In 2000, Chris Morris adapted his BBC Radio 1 sketch show Blue Jam for television, and Jam, the single-series result, remains one of the most brilliantly peculiar shows in the history of British comedy. But there’s one sketch from it that has stuck with me since I first saw it, in which an intellectually challenged woman, shall we say, is hired to deal complaints about clamping. “We specialise in providing thick people for jobs that they’re particularly good at,” runs the voiceover, as frustrations inevitably mount in the car pound. “Thick people are very good at winning arguments because they’re too thick to realise that they’ve lost.”
The gloriously gormless Philomena Cunk could have been plucked from that same agency. There was no annual Screenwipe roundup of the news in 2017, despite the world’s collective insanity appearing to reach boiling point and then some. Charlie Brooker tweeted that he had run out of time to finish it, but offered up the fact that he had delivered Cunk on Britain (BBC2), a five-part history of this fair nation, as the good news. It was well worth the sacrifice. Cunk, the breakout star of Screenwipe, delivers her faux-sombre mockumentary with such brazen silliness that it is impossible to begrudge the deployment of Brooker’s resources here.
Giving Cunk the space to apply her reporting skills to a bigger topic could have been a risk; it was always possible that her ignorance shtick might have been funniest in short bursts. But the way Diane Morgan balances Cunk’s wide-eyed astonishment and bloody-minded daftness easily sustains the concept for the full half-hour, and even leaves you wanting a little more (next week, she promises, she’ll be “probably just looking at some old pots”). The first episode takes us from the big bang to the beginning of the Tudors, and I laughed myself so stupid at its relentless one-liners that by the end, I felt like I, too, could stand against people upset that their cars had been towed.
Cunk on Britain is co-written with Ben Caudell, Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris, and like their spoof cop series A Touch of Cloth, it bombards the audience with gags and dry analogies. The Romans introducing public baths, for example, is “like when someone opens an artisan bakery in Hull”; the iron age and its Celtic chalk figures turned Britain into a “noble land of spikes and hill filth”; the Bayeux tapestry depicts “the first example of an EU national coming here and taking our jobs”. “It’s just like being there, but in wool,” Cunk observes, with that look that dares you to just try to keep a straight face at her immaculate sincerity. The linguistic acrobatics, too, are a delight. The Black Death, we are told, gravely, is “not a metaphorical plague like a metaphorical plague, but an actual plague, made of plague”.
As a piss-take of a documentary, it picks out cliches and runs with them, squashing complex and tangled periods of history into brief montages, “because we spent too long talking about Mel Gibson earlier”. But it’s Cunk’s interviewing style that is the highlight and potentially one of its weaknesses. Chucking questions that make no sense at experts was a success on Screenwipe, and it works particularly well with British history academics, whose politeness and patience only exacerbates the absurdity. She gets a Chaucer expert to tell her one of the rudest stories in the Canterbury Tales – The Miller’s Tale, in which a bum is poked out of a window and kissed – and is disappointed with the level of crudeness, so gamely offers up her own bum-based anecdote instead. She asks if King Arthur “came a lot”, and pushes the gag to a point where the academic Dr Laura Ashe seems visibly astonished.
But the problem is that Cunk, like Ali G before her, is becoming well known, and that inevitably makes it harder for the people she meets to be blindsided by her naivety, which is when the interviews are at their finest. There is a sense that some of the interviewees are just playing along, which does take the fun out of it a little, although Cunk still manages to do an excellent job of sending up Robert Peston’s rambling contemplation, mostly by just pulling a baffled face. I hope that there is room for many more Cunk Ons once she’s finished with Britain. As a puncture in the armour of po-faced documentaries, it is very funny, and as an excuse to laugh yourself into a stupor, it’s very welcome, too.
- This article was corrected on 4 April 2018 to make clear that Chris Morris’s sketch show Blue Jam was originally commissioned and broadcast by BBC Radio 1, though it was later repeated on Radio 4 Extra.
