Cunk on Life

Al Campbell's Cunk on Life launched on BBC Two in January 2024 and was nominated for several BAFTA Television Awards. The seventy-minute special is the latest outing for Diane Morgan's Philomena Cunk, the slow-witted, unwarrantedly confident regional television presenter at the centre of Charlie Brooker's long-running mockumentary universe. She first appeared in Brooker's Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe (2013) and has since starred in Cunk on Britain (2018), Cunk on Earth (2022) and a steady supply of short internet clips.

The premise, that Cunk has been commissioned to answer the most fundamental question of all, what is life, sets her loose on a series of patient academic interviews with scientists, philosophers and historians, each obliged to engage seriously with her gnomic and frequently surreal questions. The interviewees are real (Brian Cox, Daisy Christodoulou, Douglas Hedley, Tom Whyman, Diana Walsh Pasulka), and their good-faith answers to her lateral, fact-resistant questioning are a large part of the pleasure.

Morgan commits completely to Cunk's confused confidence, with a deadpan that only the long Yorkshire tradition (Victoria Wood, Reece Shearsmith, the original Knowing Me Knowing You) had sustained before her, and Cunk has become one of the most distinctive comic creations of British television in the 2010s and 2020s. The recurring jokes, among them the appearances of the Belgian electronic track Pump Up the Jam by Technotronic and the running misuse of the word nominally, work as a small shibboleth for the people who have been watching all along.