Philomena Cunk has finally discovered the movies, and Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Bay had to sit across from her and answer her questions. Cunk on Cinema, the new mockumentary from Diane Morgan and Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker, opened in Britain on Thursday night and streams on Netflix outside the UK from Sunday, November 15.
The first episode went out on BBC Two at 10 p.m. UK time on November 12, with listings promising that Cunk would learn “the true meaning of The Wizard Of Oz.” The run is short: three half-hour episodes.
Who Cunk talks to this time
The joke of every Cunk project is the guest list. Real experts, often very distinguished ones, agree to be interviewed by a presenter who appears to understand almost nothing. This time the roster runs to 23 people, according to the published lineup. The headline names are Cumberbatch and Transformers director Michael Bay. Behind them come film critic Mark Kermode, composer Daniel Pemberton, Die Hard co-writer Steven E. de Souza, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, filmmaker Mark Cousins and Bryony Dixon, the silent film curator at the British Film Institute. Physicist Jim Al-Khalili returns from Cunk on Life.
The broadcaster’s official description says the series will travel from the invention of the camera through the French New Wave of the 1960s to computer-generated effects and artificial intelligence. Cunk, it says, “will attempt to demystify it all while sitting in lumpy seats with stale popcorn.”
Brooker again leads the writing room, with Morgan among the credited writers, and Al Campbell, who made Cunk on Life, directs all three episodes.
Who is Philomena Cunk, for American viewers
Cunk is a character, not a real presenter, though plenty of interviewees have played along as if she were. Morgan, a comedian from Farnworth near Bolton in north-west England, first played her in 2013 on Brooker’s satirical BBC show Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe. Brooker originally imagined Cunk as a middle-class lifestyle blogger; Morgan asked to read the part in her own Bolton accent, and the deadpan, earnest and totally confused version stuck.
Netflix has carried her to viewers far beyond Britain. Cunk on Earth and Cunk on Life both stream there, and the service describes her as a “deadpan documentarian” who “confounds philosophers and academics.” Morgan has also had US viewers through Ricky Gervais’s Netflix series After Life, where she played Kath.
A short timeline of Cunk
- 2013: Cunk debuts on Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe.
- 2016: Cunk on Shakespeare and Cunk on Christmas, both on BBC Two.
- 2018: Cunk on Britain, five episodes, including the much-shared clip in which she mixes up Camelot with a rude pun.
- 2022: Cunk on Earth, which earned Morgan a British Academy Television Award nomination.
- 2024: Cunk on Life, a one-off special that brought a Primetime Emmy nomination for writing.
- 2026: Cunk on Cinema, three episodes for the BBC and Netflix.
Since 2022 a new Cunk project has landed roughly every two years, alternating between a series and a feature-length special, so this is the first multi-episode Cunk run in four years.
Why cinema suits her
Film history is a subject people already argue about with total confidence, which is exactly the territory Cunk thrives in. Critics’ polls still fight over the greatest film ever made, as our look at why Kurt Russell and Michael Caine both pick Casablanca showed, and classic Hollywood stories like how Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant made Charade are the kind of lore Cunk will happily misunderstand. All three episodes of Cunk on Cinema arrive on Netflix on November 15.
Further reading
Image: JIP, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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