Diane Morgan is back as Philomena Cunk in Cunk on Cinema, a three-part history of film that opens with a joke so fast it barely leaves room to breathe. Within the first 12 seconds, Cunk starts listing humanity’s great achievements, including “conquering the landscape, growing the great wall of Chinese, discovering Mona Lisa and inventing global warming”.
That opening sets the tone for why the character still works. Philomena Cunk has been a fixture since 2012, when she first turned up as a spoof talking head on Charlie Brooker’s annual end-of-year Screenwipe special. She was introduced then as a “computer typist”, a “Bake Off viewer” and an “influential Tweetist”, and she has since moved into solo documentary territory with Brooker and longtime collaborators Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley still helping shape the scripts.
The new series keeps the formula simple and elastic. Morgan’s deadpan performance carries the comedy, while the guests are there to absorb the impact of her questions and misreadings. Benedict Cumberbatch appears, as do film critic Mark Kermode, film-maker Michael Bay and Steven E de Souza, the writer of Die Hard. The result is part prank show, part scripted satire, with Cunk’s tangents described as impressively random and one recurring thread running through the series: AI.
What makes the show land is that not everyone seems to be playing the same game. Some interviewees appear ready for the bit, but Kermode looks genuinely exasperated when Cunk mangles The Jazz Singer as “The Jizz Slinger”. That is the show’s sharpest trick: it blurs the line between the people who are in on the joke and the ones who are stuck answering it.
Morgan’s CV now stretches well beyond Cunk, including Motherland and Ricky Gervais’ After Life, alongside her own sitcoms Mandy and the acclaimed Ann Droid. But the appeal of this franchise is that it keeps returning to the same deadpan engine and finding fresh targets for it. Cunk on Cinema does not reinvent the format. It sharpens it, then sends it straight at film history.
