I n a world of slow-burn, jargon-littered dramas, there’s something to be said for the TV programme that sets out its stall within the first 12 seconds. Cunk on Cinema is one such programme. The latest series from Diane Morgan’s sensationally idiotic documentarian is a three-part history of film that begins with our host reeling off some of humanity’s greatest achievements in her deadpan Bolton tones. Specifically, “conquering the landscape, growing the great wall of Chinese, discovering Mona Lisa and inventing global warming”. If you think that list is funny, you’ll enjoy what is essentially a vehicle for some of the stupidest jokes ever written. If you find that kind of malapropism and misapprehension childish, I suggest you switch off immediately.
We first encountered Philomena Cunk in 2012 as a spoof talking head on Charlie Brooker’s annual end-of-year Screenwipe special. Billed variously as a “computer typist”, “Bake Off viewer” and “influential Tweetist”, she was at heart a stubbornly ill-informed woman-of-the-people who offered confused commentary on pressing subjects of the time, such as Jimmy Carr’s tax avoidance and the dog from The Artist . Thanks mainly to Morgan’s ability to spout surreal tosh in an appealing no-nonsense fashion, Cunk was a hit. Soon she branched out into solo documentary-making (with Brooker and his longtime colleagues, including Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley, still co-writing her material), covering subjects as modest as “Britain” and later “Earth”, bamboozling her expert interviewees with inane yet dogged questioning like a cross between Jeremy Paxman, Louis Theroux and a far less problematic Ali G.
Cunk on Cinema – like its predecessors – is technically a prank show: half the fun is in seeing how people react to Cunk’s idiocy. Yet with a CV that includes Motherland and Ricky Gervais’ After Life, as well as her own BBC sitcoms Mandy and the acclaimed Ann Droid , Morgan is at this point practically a household name. As such, you have to assume that her British interlocutors are by now well aware of her shtick.
That includes Benedict Cumberbatch, whose irritation in the face of pointless questions about whether all actors like chickpeas seems put on (the fact Cumberbatch and Morgan are now both players in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – the latter featured prominently in recent series VisionQuest – also slightly undermines the whole David and Goliath nature of the encounter). Then again, film critic Mark Kermode looks genuinely exasperated by Cunk’s ludicrous misunderstandings – calling pioneering talkie The Jazz Singer “The Jizz Slinger”, for example – so maybe the character is simply so annoying she’s able to get a rise out of people even when they’re in on the joke.
Meanwhile, the Americans – film-maker Michael Bay and Die Hard writer Steven E de Souza among them – are straightforwardly baffled, but to their credit they still tolerate Cunk’s tangents with a grace that means this is never an exercise in gotcha-style cringe. Those tangents are impressively random (the most off-topic probably being the tale of a friend losing control of his bowels on a night bus), yet there is one recurring theme: AI. Cunk’s obsession with the technology serves to consolidate her stupidity. She insists on showing de Souza AI-generated footage of Buster Keaton on a BMX; elsewhere, she tries to win arguments by getting ChatGPT to back up her categorically incorrect beliefs.
Alongside all this, we get a vague grounding in cinematic history, with a whistle-stop tour through German expressionism, French New Wave, blockbusters and more. There’s enough information to sustain the mockumentary framework, but don’t come hoping to learn anything new about “Ian Hitchcock”. (I could listen to Cunk get megastars’ names wrong all day, which is lucky because at times it feels like 90% of the jokes involve misnomers such as “Wayne John” and “Robert Redfuck”.)
Instead of a proper education in Hollywood history, viewers are given the opportunity to expand their horizons with hitherto unimaginably idiotic takes. Sometimes the writing gets proper belly laughs: there’s a very good bit about the idea that dancing in films once represented sex, applied tastelessly to Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, plus a hysterical segment in which Cunk puts various grotesque scenarios to “David Clamworth” from the British Board of Film Classification that I wish had gone on for longer.
Even when the script is merely snigger-inducing, the gag rate is so relentless there’s simply no time to stop smiling. If, like me, you consider writing stupid jokes to be another of humanity’s greatest achievements, you’ll have no choice but to consider Cunk on Cinema a true work of art.
