Pouring champagne and ironing knickers: my day serving the matriarchy as a topless male waiter

“Mum”, a drag mistress sporting a severe blonde bob, dresses me in a black tuxedo jacket and tie, chest and belly exposed – then puts me to work ironing knickers. Later, I’m handed a feather duster with which to polish an array of white porcelain dicks – alternately girthy, proud, veiny and shrivelled – protruding from the rich green velvet drapes (Peter Lundberg’s 91 Penises).This is the price of entry to the Museum of Old and New Art’s Ladies Lounge – if you’re a man.The nipaluna/Hobart museum reopened the lounge last week for a one-month victory lap, after a sex discrimination complaint first won by New South Wales man Jason Lau was overturned in lutruwita/Tasmania’s supreme court. Operating since 2020 as a space for women to luxuriate in their own company, the lounge is now allowing men to enter on select days – provided they remove their shirts and serve the matriarchy inside

Janey Godley remembered by Nicola Sturgeon

20 January 1961 – 2 November 2024The former first minister hails the talents of the Scottish comedian and actor who made people laugh in the darkest of times, not least with with her parodies of the politician’s Covid briefingsVery early in the pandemic, somebody in my office said, “Have you seen these voiceover videos of your Covid briefings that Janey Godley is doing? They’re really, really funny.’” So I watched a couple of them and they really, really were.Obviously, Covid was such a hard and dark time for everybody, and for me as first minister, it was stressful, but after finding out about Janey’s voiceovers, I remember quite quickly getting into this kind of pattern: after I did the briefing every day, half an hour later I’d go to see if Janey had posted anything – she used to post her videos quickly – just to lift my spirits and cheer me up. They always made me laugh.Janey took the – excuse my language – piss out of me on many occasions, yes, but that’s par for the course

‘A Model Murder’: the 1954 trial that gripped Sydney takes to the stage

In 1954, when the 22-year-old Sydney model Shirley Beiger went on trial for the alleged murder of her live-in lover, hundreds of spectators, many of them women, queued outside Darlinghurst’s courthouse with sandwiches, Thermos flasks and even babies, hoping for a seat.“They were yelling, ‘God bless you, Shirl,’” says the award-winning theatre maker Sheridan Harbridge. “They were fully behind her and what she’d done.”The playwright and director is speaking to Guardian Australia while seated by the dock where Beiger stood trial 70 years ago. In January the courthouse will be the setting for A Model Murder, a theatrical recreation of the trial that draws on court transcripts

Michael Mosley remembered by Dr Phil Hammond

22 March 1957 – 5 June 2024 His former TV colleague recalls an exhilarating advocate for self-help with a zeal for exposing health scandalsI met Michael Mosley in 1995, when he asked me to audition to present a TV series he was creating called Trust Me, I’m a Doctor. He wanted someone who wasn’t afraid to take down their own profession and I seemed to fit the bill. I liked him immediately, and we discovered we had a lot in common: raised abroad, the privilege of private school and Oxbridge and driven by escaping the fate of our fathers (mine died at 38 by suicide, Mike’s in his early 70s from the complications of diabetes). And we’d both married wonderful GPs to keep us on track.Michael had stopped being a doctor and he needed someone who still was to take the flak

Nonfiction to look out for in 2025

From a river voyage with Robert Macfarlane to Helen Garner’s candid tale of a broken marriage, via Ian Leslie’s analysis of Lennon and McCartney’s complicated kinship, here are the titles you can’t afford to missNonfiction is a strange, alchemical business. In the knowledge that a good writer can make any subject sing, one of the books I’m looking forward to most in 2025 is The Season: A Fan’s Story (W&N, November), in which Helen Garner watches her grandson, Amby, play Aussie rules football during one Melbourne winter. Such territory sounds, I know, slight and even parochial; on paper, I have less than zero interest in footy down under. But this is Garner we’re talking about: Australia’s greatest writer of nonfiction. It’s certain to be epic

A laugh a day to keep the winter blues away: the 31-day comedy diet for January

From the Two Ronnies to TikTok via near-forgotten TV classics, here’s our dose of daily fun to ring the new year in with cheerAmid the cascade of solemn, grimly sensible resolutions we inevitably set ourselves at this time of year, there is a task of universal importance that all too often slips through the net: laugh more. It’s something that more or less all of us agree is a good idea – few people would confidently say “no thanks, I laugh too much actually, and if anything I need to cut down” (perhaps a particularly giggly funeral director). But how does one achieve such an aim? When the cost of living continues to squeeze us into oblivion? When we live in the age of enshittification? And, above all else, in grim, desolate January?Enter the Cultural Diet, the annual Observer feature that offers up 31 pieces of work, one for each day of the month, to help enrich and uplift the start of your year. This year, the theme is comedy – there can surely be no better inoculation against the unspecified horrors of a new year – and the weighty task of issuing the recommendations has fallen to me.As well as a writer, I happen to be a professional comedian – among other things, part of globetrotting comedy double act Max & Ivan, the recipient of an Edinburgh comedy award, and a member of the vast writing team of the Bafta-garlanded Horrible Histories (would the show have been so successful without my homeopathic contributions? Who knows! But also: yes)