A one-day symposium organised by The Centre for Applied History and the Department of English, Macquarie University, Sydney on Friday, 7 September 2018 “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” This famous opening sentence from L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953) provokes questions of how the “pastness” of the past is remembered, recuperated and represented, especially in this postmodern age where the

Entertainment television programmes help shape the public discourse on politics. As American political communication scholar R. Lance Holbert pointed out, these shows can play a vital part for the public understanding of politics and the public discourse on current issues.