
Having successfully explored the entire arc of human civilization in 2022’s Cunk on Earth, it seems that Philomena Cunk’s ambitions know no bounds. Cunk on Earth was but a warm-up — its predecessor, Cunk on Britain, kids’ stuff — because with Cunk on Life she discovered answers to the biggest questions of all, ones regarding our very existence — life, the universe, everything. Being the most idiotic, deadpan, dense human being on television, alas, her investigation elicited few revelations.
Or did it? Actually, via her interviews with academics struggling to reply to the sheer stupidity of her questions (they must surely by now know this is a spoof, right?), it showed us how little even our biggest thinkers truly know, much in the way that a small child’s unexpectedly profound question can leave a parent profoundly stumped.
“Does God have a brother called Simon?” Cunk baldly asked a frowning science author. “No,” he replied, which she challenged straight back: “But they can’t prove that either, so he might have. The universe could have been created by Simon.” There was no answer to this. She might be right.
Cunk — of course, Diane Morgan’s parody of BBC presenters on a landmark “journey” — was soon prodding her serious-faced interviewees into saying such things as “all humans have a human body”. So far, so familiar and not a single sentence was serious. Yet this particular Cunk opus took the whole thing further than ever before.
At one point she got Douglas Hedley, professor of philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, to give a lengthy explanation of why God won’t be found hiding in a cupboard. When Cunk suddenly declared to an affronted professor that not all humans have skeletons — that some of us are solid meat — you wouldn’t have wanted to be sipping a mouthful of tea. “Burt Lancaster, he was solid meat apparently. Like a sausage.”
• Diane Morgan: ‘I don’t think there’s enough stupid comedy’
It’s the kind of daft comedy that’s hilarious when not being just too puerile, but which can wear thin after, say, half an hour. So perhaps mindful of that, Morgan and creator Charlie Brooker decided to give things a hard left-turn in the 28th minute to wake viewers up out of their stupor, when Cunk’s consciousness (speaking in voiceover) became separated from her body during a meditation sequence. In a moment to befuddle Descartes, her consciousness was then shot and killed.
After a short intermission, the programme returned with an advert for a Cunk doll, travelling the universe in a spacecraft, the USS Triceratops, repairing black holes and mutilating cattle. Finally, some properly bizarro comedy back on the BBC!
In fact, you felt as if Morgan, Brooker and the rest of the writing team were splurging their maddest ideas straight out on to the screen. During a sequence on reproduction, a sudden black-and-white close-up of a flaccid penis will have alarmed viewers to a degree commensurate with the size of their plasma screen.
An explanation of Edwin Hubble’s astronomic epiphany of 1923 somehow turned into a full-on sex scene. Things edged into sicko Chris Morris territory with a Sesame Street-like ditty designed to help stop depressed kids standing on ledges: “Binko Says Don’t Jump!”
Were they stoned in that writing room? All I know by the end of this exhausting, fitfully very funny nonsense is that Cunk was making me genuinely consider how not everything is made up of atoms because “thoughts aren’t”. Where she can possibly go next after all this really does make the mind boggle.
★★★★✰
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