Series / Philomena Cunk

Where does your lap go when you stand up?

Philomena Cunk, played by English actress Diane Morgan and usually referred to simply by her last name, is a fictional character created as a talking head for Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe. She later received her own Moments of Wonder segment within that programme, and eventually went on to star in several commissioned mockumentary series, the titles of which all begin with Cunk On....

Cunk is a completely clueless journalist and commentator, and the Cunk On... shows are marked by her total absence of basic knowledge about whatever she's talking about, coupled with her firm confidence that she does know what she's talking about. Joel Morris, a writer for several of the shows, said that the basic joke with the character is that viewers ask themselves, "Why have they given a show to someone who knows less about this than me?"

Cunk interviews various (real) authorities on whatever subject she's looking into, and frequently asks questions that are so bizarre that her interviewees don't know how to answer. Unlike other shows such as Brasseye and Da Ali G Show where the interviewees weren't aware that they were being interviewed by a fictional character, the interviewees are 100% in on the joke in the Cunk On... shows — which, the creators say, is the point.

All of Cunk's series thus far:

• Cunk On Shakespeare: Cunk reviews the career of the man they called "The King of the Bards".
• Cunk On Christmas: Cunk goes on a journey right up Christmas, to discover whether the true meaning of Christmas has any meaning today.
• Cunk On Britain: Cunk's very personal history of The United Britain of Great Kingdom.
• Cunk On Earth: Nothing less than a history of human civilisation, in which Cunk asks the big questions, such as "What was the Soviet Onion?" and "Do we know if China has a roof?" This series garnered Morgan a BAFTA nomination for Best Female Comedy Performance.

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Philomena Cunk gives examples of:

• Abbey Road Crossing: Cunk naturally does one of these in Cunk On Britain when talking about The Beatles ("George, Ringo and their guitar players.")
• The Abridged History:
  • Cunk On Britain is a parody of sweeping history documentaries on Britain complete with the same methods done by presenters and even the same stock music, presented by Philomena Cunk.
  • Similarly Cunk On Earth parodies documentaries on world history.
• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: While talking to an English teacher, Cunk has the (for her) rare experience of realising that she got something wrong.
  Cunk: How does iambic pentameter work?
  Matthew Burton: I think you're talking about iambic pentameter, which is the way that—
  Cunk: Iambic pentameter.
  Matthew Burton: Pentameter, yeah.
  Cunk: Pentameter.
  Matthew Burton: Well, pentameter, so...
  Cunk: [stares at him suspiciously]
  Matthew Burton: It, it would be a line of prose that would have ten syllables, with five particular stresses on—
  Cunk: Not pentameter.
  Matthew Burton: No, not pentameter, no, it's pentameter.
  Cunk: [quietly] Right. [glances off-camera at someone, looks back, shakes her head as if very annoyed] Someone told me it—I was misinformed, it's fine.
  Matthew Burton: Who—who told you?
  Cunk: [points to someone off-camera, murmurs] See him over there...
  Matthew Burton: Oh right. Emm... no, it's, it's iambic pentameter, yeah. Iambic pentameter.
  Cunk: [gives a Death Glare to whoever she pointed to and shakes her head again, clearly very, very annoyed indeed]
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Downplayed. Philomena looks and sounds like a serious reporter, but she's quite easily bored, doesn't seem to like reading or fine art, eats a banana during a Shakespearean monologue, and believes life wasn't worth living before the invention of television. This might also explain the Running Gag of cutting to irrelevant footage during her programs.
• Bait-and-Switch: Often Cunk will appear to be saying something poignant or intelligent, only to immediately ruin her attempt at being deep with a malaprop or a profoundly strange statement.
  Cunk: If it wasn't for the Suffragettes, I wouldn't be standing here now. I'd be in a kitchen, where I belong.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Michelangelo's David has no anus.
  Cunk: Yet despite all this attention to detail, a quick inspection of his back half reveals he doesn't have an anus. It's a baffling omission. Maybe the sculptor got embarrassed, or the model had to leave early that day, or didn't actually have an anus. We just don't know.
• Blunt "No": Dr. Irving Finkel, who studies anthropology, probably thought better of trying to make sense of one of Cunk's many dazzlingly half-baked questions:
  Cunk: [on a model of a Mesopotamian clay writing tablet] If someone shouted this aloud... would that have been the first audio book?
  [Beat]
  Finkel: ... no.
• Breakout Character: She began as one of many Talking Heads on Weekly Wipe but soon got her own special, and as of 2022 is on her second full series, Cunk On Earth.
• Buffy Speak: Speaking on dinosaurs, Cunk refers to stegosauruses as "the across ones" and tyrannosaurus rex as "the up-and-down ones".
• Butt-Monkey: Philomena's offscreen friend "my mate Paul", who she occasionally relates horrifying anecdotes about, and who apparently regularly suffers one painful or unpleasant indignity after another.
• Classical Music Is Boring: Philomena certainy believes so, she complains that Beethoven's 5th Symphony doesn't have lyrics and so is "literally meaningless". She points out that every time somebody talks about the middle ages there has to be an annoying harpsichord sound playing in the background. At one point she is made to listen to a 100 year old phonograph recording. it looks like she's about to burst into tears, and she pleads for it to be turned off.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: Cunk's mind can take some seriously weird left turns. She thinks statues are alive, she asks an expert in Ancient Egypt if a mummy can ride a bicycle, she doesn't believe in night time, and in one interview she brings up wasps for no reason at all.
• The Comically Serious: The central gag of the show. At the heart is Cunk herself, who relates poorly-researched gibberish with a completely straight face. Then there's her interviewees, who have to figure out a way of somehow responding to her idiotic questions.
• Comical Overreacting: Philomena is usually stoic with her absurdly dense assertions, but at one point during the Cunk on Earth series, she was completely flabbergasted by the basic concept of a telescope:
  Cunk: [immediately after looking through a telescope] Bloody hell! This makes everything look massive!
• Cringe Comedy: Some of the interviews have this, especially when it looks like the real person Philomena is talking to is completely unaware that she's an actor playing a character. In fact, as noted above, all of them do know that; it's just that some are very good at reacting to her as though she's for real.
• Deadpan Snarker: Cunk makes hilarious observations with the tone one would expect from a historical documentary narrator.
• Dissimile: A spectacular one that comes full circle:
  Cunk: In 1953, millions of people watched the Queen being coronationed, on their new televisions. It must have been like watching The Crown on Netflix, but live and actually happenin', like Britain's Got Talent, but more serious, like Game of Thrones, but set in the real world, and starring Queen Elizabeth, like The Crown again.
• Distaff Counterpart: Cunk was originally created for Weekly Wipe as one of these for a character named Barry Shitpeas, although she soon broke out.
• The Ditz: Cunk, obviously. (Zig-zagged from time to time: see Dumbass Has a Point.)
  • She believes that dinosaurs were killed to fuel steam trains.
  • She believes that jokes weren't invented until after Shakespeare's death.
  • She believes that Alan Turing built a machine that "killed Hitler":
    Cunk: He was called Alan Turing, and the authorities persecuted him because he was gay. Then they drew a veil over it, which is where the phrase "Turing shroud" comes from.
  • She believes that Vikings had to pull their helmets on over their "skull horns".
  • She believes that tinsel is a plant.
    Cunk: Tinsel became a decoration because you can't do anything else with it. It's horrible in salads, and won't boil down for soup.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Every so often, Philomena says something that really hits home.
  • Working in the industrialized world
    Cunk: Factories were cavernous holes of noise and machinery, dirty and dangerous environments without even basic wi-fi, and only the most rudimentary breakout spaces. But they were changing Britain forever. These days, no-one works in these factories except ghosts, and even then, they only work night shifts. Workers did long thankless hours with no breaks and low pay, in a squalid and threatening environment, conditions unthinkable today to anyone who isn't a junior doctor.
  • Political leaders
    Cunk: When he became leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler was a funny-looking character with silly hair. A bit like Boris Johnson. But he turned out to be a hateful maniac, who would let nothing get in the way of his ambition. A bit like Boris Johnson.
  • Race in the US
    Cunk: They don't have racism in America any more. When they voted for Obama, they sorted all of that out. These days, America has changed and black people can be whatever they want to be. As long as it's either president or shot.
  • In a "Moments of Wonder" section on Churchill, her interviewee even concedes this:
    Cunk: Why do we say that Churchill won the war, when we know that he didn't have a proper go at it himself, did he?
    Peter Catterall: You mean in terms of fighting?
    Cunk: Yeah. I mean he just sat underground in a hole, didn't he, smokin' and tellin' people what to do, like a minicab operator.
    Peter Catterall: Well, I suppose in some ways it's quite a good analogy, because unless you've got someone directing the fleet, the soldiers, the tanks, et cetera, then similarly, it's not going to work.
  • While discussing the less than comfortable audience arrangements in William Shakespeare's days, she even manages to somewhat stump the interviewee
    Cunk: So some of 'em had to stand up, they didn't have chairs.
    Iqbal Khan: Yeah, no, no, they'd be standing.
    Cunk: I've never had to stand for a whole Shakespeare, I don't think I could do it, I'd be livid if I didn't have a chair.
    Iqbal Khan: I think the audiences quite enjoyed, particularly now...
    Cunk: I don't think they do enjoy standing, do they?
    Iqbal Khan: They actually enjoy the experience of standing.
    Cunk: Who's told you that?
    Iqbal Khan: [Beat] Erm...
• The Everyman: In Cunk On Christmas a chaplain talks about how Jesus being born helps make him relatable.
  Cunk: Why do you think it's important that Jesus was born? Would it have been more interesting if he'd been built, like R2D2?
  Rev. Canon Ann Easter: It would've been more interesting, but the important this is that he can identify us, and he was a real human being.
  Cunk: Makes him more, sort of, relatable?
  Rev. Canon Ann Easter: Yes, very much so.
• Fictional Greetings and Farewells: Cunk often greets interviewees in a way that's slightly... off, such as a blunt "Who are you?" or "What's your game?", suggesting that she genuinely has no idea who they are.
• Gamer Chick: Philomena has shown familiarity with several video games, from Pac-Man to Mario Kart to Call of Duty, and gets annoyed when she finds out Charles Babbage's engine doesn't have any games on it.
• Gorgeous Period Dress: Cunk dons one of these and a large curly red wig in Cunk on Shakespeare, in order to dress up as Elizabeth I. Played for laughs in that she doesn't change her flat Northern accent or deadpan delivery in any way.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": Cunk is seen examining a folio of Shakespeare's plays, opened at the title page of Coriolanus. Her finger is pointing at the last four letters and she looks up at the camera and smiles.
• Iconic Outfit: Cunk almost always wears a man's business suit, a blue shirt and a long tweed coat. Parodied in one episode where she's visiting a spa and takes off her robe for a massage, only to reveal that she's wearing the suit underneath. The masseuse goes to take her jacket and Cunk irritatedly shrugs her off.
• Innocent Innuendo: Philomena, upon learning that an orchestra isn't an instrument.
  Cunk: So you couldn't blow a whole orchestra.
• In-Universe Factoid Failure: Cunk is a fountain of these.
  • Shakespeare had no middle name and nobody calls him "The King of the Bards".
    Cunk: So join me, Philomena Cunk, as I go on a journey all the way into William Bartholomew Shakespeare, the man they call "The King of the Bards".
  • Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: She believes Romeo and Juliet to be a romantic comedy until she discovers halfway through an interview with Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells that both Romeo and Juliet die at the end.
  • From one of the "Moments of Wonder" bits in Weekly Wipe:
    Cunk: Nineteen centuries ago, there was an Industrial Revolution, which used coals. Coals is a fossil fuel, which means setting fire to dinosaurs. It's this dirty dinosaur gas which has been blamed for climate change.
• Insane Troll Logic: On the question of comedy:
  Cunk: They say that laughter's the best medicine, but if that were true, why do so many comedians die of cancer? Perhaps they weren't funny enough. It's a sobering thought, and that's useful, because many comedians are also alcoholics.
• Kissing Cousins: Combined with a Take That! against a certain region of England:
  Cunk: Soon, Romeo and Juliet are in love, even though they come from two different families, which is how we know it isn't set in Norfolk.
• Malaproper:
  • Cunk thinks that Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is called "Tight Arse and Monicus".
  • She refers to the bubonic plague as "the bionic plague".
  • She calls the Magna Carta the "Magma Carta", which in turn causes her to inform us that, according to Google Translate, "'Magma Carta' is Latin for 'cardboard volcano'."
  • She thinks Benedict Cumberbatch's name is "Benylin Thundercrack".
  • And that the RMS Titanic was the "Titan 1C".
• Many Questions Fallacy: Cunk has one in Cunk on Shakespeare.
  Cunk: Did Shakespeare write nothing but boring gibberish, with no relevance to our modern world of Tinder and peri-peri fries, or does it just look, sound and feel that way?
• Men Are Uncultured: Inverted. Many of the male interviewees are experts in art, philosophy, theatre, or other forms of culture. Meanwhile, Cunk has a surface level of art, barely understands philosophy, and one of the longest Running Gags is her complete and utter disdain for theatre.
• Narrating the Obvious: Cunk often tells exactly us what we're looking at, in the least nuanced way possible.
  Kate Williams: So that's really the very early beginning of going from house to house, singing carols.
  [Cut to some boy choristers singing "Ding Dong Merrily On High" in a church.]
  Cunk: [narrating] Because the history lady said that, we've now cut to this. Some boys singing carols in a church. On Earth.
  [Cut to Cunk watching them and looking bored. She does an Aside Glance.]
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: During Episode 4 of "Cunk on Earth," she gets genuinely upset when she realizes that nuclear weapons are still a threat, to the point where she starts crying. And in the following episode, she demands a minute of silence when she learns about Laika's death.
• Oop North: Cunk talks in a more pronounced version of Diane Morgan's own Bolton accent.
• Pants-Free: In a "Moments of Wonder" about charity, Cunk urges the viewer to reach into their pockets to donate to charity, and if they don't have money in there, then donating the pocket, or the entire pair of trousers. Then:
  Cunk: Next time on "Moments of Wonder", I'll be asking "How much are new trousers?"
  [Cunk crosses a road wearing her usual suit but without any trousers.]
• Precision F-Strike: While interviewing Shakespearean actor Simon Russell Beale:
  Cunk: Do you just learn the famous bits, like "To be or not to be", or do you learn all the bits in between as well?
  Simon Russell Beale: No, you learn all the bits in between.
  Cunk: Are you fucking joking?
  Simon Russell Beale: No no no. I mean, it's big, but it... it takes a bit of time.
  Cunk: Shut up.
• Product Placement: Parodied. In Cunk On Earth, her travels take her to an ancient temple—which, she adds, you can visit while staying at a particular luxury resort. The show then turns for five minutes into an extended promotion for the resort, with "PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL" in the top-right corner of the screen, with Cunk describing its attractions. At the end of it, she's seen stealing bathroom supplies and darts a furtive look at the camera.
• Pun
  Cunk: Henry's also memorable for his chronic wife addiction. He had 6 wives all called Catherine. He was a Catherine-aholic, or Catholic for short.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Cunk claims that the ancient Greeks invented culture, in the form of yoghurt. The bacterial colony used to produce yoghurt is, in fact, called a culture.
• Ripped from the Headlines: This joke resonated very much in 2018, with Brexit looming on the horizon:
  Cunk: Britain was left on its own, had taken back control from the unelected bureaucrats of Rome, and was free at last to explore its own proud destiny. And it did that by immediately entering the Dark Ages.
• Running Gag:
  • In Cunk On Britain, every single episode contained a reference to the date of the first broadcast of the obscure 80s British sitcom Brush Strokes, which is then followed by the first minute or so of that show's opening titles, with its theme tune by Dexys Midnight Runners.
  • In Cunk On Earth, a similar gag has a Non Sequitur reference to the 1989 Belgian techno anthem "Pump Up The Jam" each episode, followed by a minute or so of the song's video and some entirely inaccurate factoids about it. Subverted by the final episode of the series where the song actually has some reference to the events mentioned around it (specifically the Berlin Wall), though the factoids remain inaccurate.
  • Cunk's love of crisps ^note For US readers, potato chips tends to come up frequently.
  • Cunk is also obviously a bit of a phoneaholic, and several moments can be found where she is presumably supposed to be regarding something or someone with fascinated awe but isn't because she's clearly gotten bored and started playing with her phone instead.
• Shaped Like Itself: Cunk resorts to this because she can't count.
  Cunk: [counting on her fingers] Shakespeare actually invented seven different genres of play: tragedy, fantasy, romance, comedy, horror and historical. [looks at her hand for a moment] ... And Shakespearean.
• Stunned Silence: Historian Laura Ashe, in her first appearance on Cunk On Britain, has one of these when confronted with Cunk's opening remark: "King Arthur came a lot." She has an even longer one when, after she's cleared up that Arthur's court was called Camelot, Cunk won't let it lie:
  Cunk: Right. But do we know if he came a lot? Or, like, just the same as an average man? Like, about a tablespoon?
  Laura Ashe: [Stunned Silence] ... The only evidence I have in that regard is that he is said to have had one child.
  Cunk: Right. So probably not.
  Laura Ashe: Probably not.
• Stylistic Suck: Zig-zagged. The production values of the show are great. The camerawork is fluid, the clips are generally well-chosen, the experts are genuine experts in their field, and it looks fantastic. It's just that Cunk herself is an idiot.
  • In one episode of Cunk On Britain, the production team have obviously failed to get any decent Stock Footage of D-Day and presumably can't afford the rights to footage from Saving Private Ryan, so instead they use footage from Call of Duty 2. Duly lampshaded by Cunk in the narration:
    Cunk: In gruelling and exciting scenes like these, expertly depicted in the pulse-quickening video game Call of Duty 2, soldiers grumbled out of their boats, looking for power-ups and health kits, terrified every second that a Nazi bullet might kill them, forcing them to respawn several feet away and be delayed by a number of seconds.
  • The question of who, exactly, in their right mind would put Philomena Cunk at the forefront of a series of high-budget history and current affairs documentaries can still come up while watching, of course. According to one of the writers on the Rule of Three podcast, a bit of meta-narrative the writers use to resolve this issue is that one of the producers is desperately in love with Cunk (who is, of course, too stupid to realise this), and so keeps putting her in TV shows in a vain attempt to get her to notice him.
• Take That!: Cunk repeatedly delivers these, although she seems to do so on the assumption that the viewer agrees with her:
  Cunk: It's hard to believe but, back then, people really did go to the theatre on purpose.
  Cunk: It was a time when nothing existed. Empty, without motion or energy or light or hope. Just like Plymouth today.
  Cunk: [standing outside the notoriously Brutalist-style National Theatre] This is the National National Theatre. It's designed to look so horrible that people are glad to be inside, watching boring plays.
  Cunk: Today racist bigotry has no place in contemporary Britain. Except Kent.
  Cunk: As a Puritan, Cromwell outlawed popular entertainment, effectively turning the entire country into BBC 4.
  Cunk: This iron man didn't have superpowers, like the Iron Man in films. He couldn't fly, or tolerate Gwyneth Paltrow.
• Twisted Christmas: Cunk thinks that this is what EastEnders is for.
  [A montage of EastEnders characters having vicious fights and catastrophic breakdowns at Christmas.]
  Cunk: But perhaps the most reassuring Christmas programme is EastEnders, which for years has provided an important public service, by depicting worse families having an even shitter time than yours.
• The Vitruvian Pose:
  • The title sequence of Cunk On Earth has a drawing of Cunk doing this.
  • Cunk discusses the trope namer with an expert and is horrified by his penis.
• The Un Twist:
  Cunk: Despite the spoiler in its title, Oliver's Twist doesn't have a twist at the end. Which—come to think of it—is a brilliant twist in itself. That's how clever Dickens was.
• Womanchild: The central joke of Philomena Cunk is that she's basically an ill-informed nine-year-old in a grown woman's body who has inexplicably been given various current affairs and history documentaries to host, and so keeps coming up with the kind of odd, left-of-field and occasionally surprisingly perceptive questions that a child would ask.

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