Philomena Cunk is back and better than ever, in a new Netflix show that explores the history of the world through her notorious Cunkian lens. For those who have not yet had the pleasure, Cunk (played by Diane Morgan) is a fake British TV host who has appeared in a number of specials over the last decade. After making her debut in Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker’s comedic news show Weekly Wipe in 2013, the character went on to star in a number of drily hilarious, documentary-style BBC specials of her own, like Cunk on Britain. For her big streaming debut, Cunk’s now hosting a new satirical docuseries that showcases her sardonic humor and deadpan naïveté, while taking on a much larger subject: all of human history.
Despite getting little promotion and publicity, Cunk on Earth is a deeply funny, unexpectedly informative mockumentary that delivers as many laughs as fun little facts and tidbits about human history. It is, in short, the best show you’re not watching right now.
Hosted by the ever-droll Cunk, the series is separated into five half-hour intervals of pure joy, sprinkling in a heavy dose of dry satirical humor alongside interviews with experts and historians. It’s a fresh take on the mockumentary, placing the joke on the interviewer rather than the interviewees, unlike what has previously been done in documentary-style comedies like Da Ali G Show. While other shows with similar characters, like satirical newscaster Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report, poke fun at both themselves and their guests, Cunk only ever makes a mockery of herself.
Morgan's Cunk is a clueless TV journalist, who often asks purely ridiculous questions about art, war, religion, the world's greatest philosophical thinkers, and the creation of nations, among other complex topics. She also often interjects totally off-topic queries, like about her friend Paul and terrible ex-boyfriends. But over the course of its five half-hour episodes, Cunk manages to deliver biting commentary on the immorality, hypocrisy, and seeming inanity of human nature.
In the series, Cunk walks us through the evolution of humankind, traveling all over the world to investigate the history of culture and civilization. The reporting alternates between scenes of Cunk in the middle of busy streets or docile countryside and sit-down interviews with historians and academics, all of whom are experts in their fields. As an interviewer, Cunk simultaneously displays a childlike curiosity about the world and appears completely uninterested in the topic at hand. When she’s discussing the creation of ancient cave art, for instance, she explains that “cave paintings like these are one of the first examples of civilization on Earth.” With a slight look of disapproval on her face, she adds, “Don’t worry, it gets better.”
What remains a constant, however, is her line of questioning, which often verges on the absurd. She’s prone to asking experts the most hard-hitting questions, like, “Which was more culturally significant, the Renaissance or ‘Single Ladies’ by Beyoncé?” and “Why are pyramids that shape? Is it to stop homeless people from sleeping on them?”
Of course, this is all par for the course when it comes to Cunk. In her BBC mini-series Cunk on Britain, she mispronounces King Arthur of Camelot’s title, asking an Oxford University professor if the fifth century king “came a lot.” A similar blunder also occurs in Cunk on Earth, in which the host pronounces the word “Bible” as “Bibble.” When corrected, Cunk says she’s “literally never heard anyone say it before.”
While the interviewees oftentimes appear stunned and taken aback by many of her questions, it’s clear that they are all in on the joke, which actually makes the show even more playful and amusing. At one point, Cunk asks Kate Cooper, a professor of history at the University of London, if she would say Jesus was the “first celebrity victim of cancel culture.” When Cooper starts to answer in the negative, however, Cunk cuts her off and says she is literally asking Cooper to look directly in the camera lens and call him the first victim of cancel culture for a “punchy soundbite;” Cooper bemusedly obliges.
In another scene, Cunk asks Jonathan Ferguson, the keeper of firearms and artillery at the Royal Armouries, “Why does humankind feel the need to invent killing machines like this? And could you keep your answer to a sort of soundbite length?” In response, Ferguson looks down to stop himself from cracking a smile and explains to her that it seems to be human nature to fight over resources. “I just think we’re mental,” Cunk quips.
From calling the Declaration of Independence the “most famous breakup text in history” to insisting the Soviet Union is really called the “Soviet Onion,” Cunk’s perspective of the world is gloriously silly. Occasionally, however, Cunk manages to make some insightful—albeit witty—remarks about certain issues.
In one episode, she briefly remarks on the hypocrisy of one of America’s founding principles. “America became known as land of the free, which must have come as a surprise to all the slaves,” she says. In another, Cunk bemoans the creation of capitalism, saying, “Ancient people invented currency to make life on Earth easier, but in doing so they inadvertently invented capitalism, which is going to kill everyone.” She soon follows this up by claiming to have seen it somewhere on Twitter.
Despite these types of comments, Cunk appears mostly unfazed by what she’s learning throughout the series, almost as if the answers she’s getting disappoint her. The only notable exception is when she finds out that nuclear weapons are not, in fact, a thing of the past. “It’s comforting, isn’t it, to realize we don’t have nuclear weapons these days?” she asks Ashley Jackson, a professor of military history at King’s College London. When Jackson tells her otherwise, however, Cunk loses composure and starts to cry, after which she asks him to talk about something more cheerful: “Do you like ABBA?”
Perhaps one of the most defining features of Cunk on Earth is the show’s recurrent interjection of the 1989 Technotronic song “Pump Up the Jam,” which is predictably used as a benchmark of time, randomly playing halfway through every episode. Each reference to the Belgian techno hit is accompanied by a variety of odd-ball jokes superimposed on the screen as the music video plays uninterrupted for 20 to 40 seconds at a time. It’s truly inexplicable, but for some reason, it only gets funnier each time it plays.
Aside from this bit, however, Cunk on Earth keeps every joke and every episode fresh and original. It’s thanks to its unique sense of humor that you will actually learn something along the way, which is what makes Cunk on Earth so special. You will take away so much more than a few cheap laughs. While the show is certainly not intended to be a serious educational tool, it’s simply impossible to turn off Cunk on Earth without having learned something.
