Cunk on Cinema Review: Diane Morgan Baffles Hollywood
Diane Morgan's Philomena Cunk returns with Cunk on Cinema, a three-part history of film. Our Cunk on Cinema review of the series covers Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Kermode, Michael Bay, the show's running AI gag and the writing team behind the jokes.
Cunk on Cinema, the new three-part series from Diane Morgan's deadpan documentarian Philomena Cunk, sets out to tell the history of film and mostly gets it wrong on purpose. Early reviews describe it as a hilarious, sensationally idiotic guide to cinema.
The show opens within seconds on its central joke. Cunk lists humanity's greatest achievements in her flat Bolton tones: "conquering the landscape, growing the great wall of Chinese, discovering Mona Lisa and inventing global warming."
A prank show with a long pedigree
Cunk first appeared in 2012 as a spoof talking head on Charlie Brooker's annual end-of-year Screenwipe special. She was billed variously as a "computer typist", "Bake Off viewer" and "influential Tweetist", and offered confused commentary on the news of the day.
She later moved into solo documentaries on subjects as broad as Britain and Earth. Brooker and longtime colleagues including Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley still co-write the material.
Technically, Cunk on Cinema is a prank show. Half the fun lies in watching interviewees react to her inane but dogged questions.
Who gets quizzed
Benedict Cumberbatch is asked whether all actors like chickpeas, and appears visibly irritated. Film critic Mark Kermode looks genuinely exasperated when Cunk calls the pioneering talkie The Jazz Singer "The Jizz Slinger".
American guests include film-maker Michael Bay and Die Hard writer Steven E de Souza. They are straightforwardly baffled, but they tolerate her tangents with good grace, so the series avoids gotcha-style cringe.
The tangents are random. The most off-topic is the tale of a friend losing control of his bowels on a night bus.
The AI running gag
One theme recurs: artificial intelligence. Cunk shows de Souza AI-generated footage of Buster Keaton on a BMX. Elsewhere she tries to win arguments by getting ChatGPT to back up her incorrect beliefs.
Between the jokes, viewers get a whistle-stop tour of German expressionism, French New Wave and blockbusters. The series offers enough information to sustain its mockumentary framework, though not much that is new about "Ian Hitchcock".
Morgan's credits include Motherland, Ricky Gervais's After Life and her own sitcoms Mandy and Ann Droid. She also appeared in the Marvel series VisionQuest, which the review notes makes the show's underdog framing slightly harder to sustain.
