Cunk on Life, Netflix
★★★★
I’d wager serious Monopoly money that Cunk on Life was intended as a Christmas release until Netflix thought better of it and pushed it to the new year instead. The latest iteration of the Charlie Brooker-created mockumentary is mostly concerned with spiritual matters, but reverent it is not.
The main obsession of Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) is the state of our souls. But in her Bolton accent, “our souls” sounds a lot like “arseholes”.
Clueless: Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) knows little, and cares even less.Credit: Netflix
There’s a fun drinking game to be had in taking a swig every time she says it, or gets one of her interview subjects to do so. We’re 12 minutes in before the first one, but two minutes later – after a burst of a hymn in which the King of Heaven is urged to “enter our souls” and “fill us unto the brim” – you’ll be rolling on the floor in laughter or paralytic intoxication. Or, if you’re so inclined, righteous indignation.
Cunk, who has been with us since 2013 (she first appeared on Brooker’s TV-obsessed show The Weekly Wipe), is a fabulous character who owes as much to the absurdist wordplay of Monty Python as to the shock tactics of Sacha Baron-Cohen’s Ali G.
She carries herself with the serious-minded demeanour of a Richard Attenborough or a Brian Cox (one of her interview subjects here), but is utterly devoid of knowledge, insight or even basic interest.
She’s the personification of the vapid celebrity presenter, though it’s not just the mindlessness of our fame-obsessed age that is skewered here, it’s also the pomposity of the gatekeepers of knowledge. Ignorance and wisdom are equally fair game.
Here she interviews “a variety of academics, experts and professional mammals”, to ask “some of the most significant questions you can say with a mouth”. Most have no idea they’re being set up, which is both hilarious and squirm-inducing. When she asks Cox (whose fame as a TV astrophysicist owes something to his easy-on-the-eye looks and other life as a pop star) if she’s wasting his time, he says yeah. It’s impossible not to agree.
