★★★★★
Under the “your mum” jokes, Philomena Cunk’s three-part trawl through film history turns out to be a cracking introductory course in the seventh art. In short… Absolute Cunk.
The Cunk format has not changed greatly since Diane Morgan’s Philomena Cunk moved up from a slot on Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe to Cunk on Shakespeare in 2016. Cunk walks towards the camera in front of something important, gets it wrong, then sits opposite someone who has spent a career on the subject and asks them a question nobody could answer. But if it’s not broken, don’t fix it, and anyone who even knows what Letterboxd is will be chomping at the bit to hit play on the new Cunk on Cinema.
The juvenile schoolyard gags come at you fast in a scattergun style, much like your mum. Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam”, the running gag from Cunk on Earth, is back as well, in revised form as “Pump ab das Bier,” the 1989 parody version:
Pump ab das Bier, pump es ab
Trink ihn aus den Humpen, komm lass dich nicht lumpen
Mann, kann ich euch pumpen
Pump ab das Bier, pump es jetzt, pump es hier
Pump ab das Bier, pump es ab, pump es, pump es, pump es
Etc. The fascinating thing is that there is an actually good history of cinema threaded through all of this. Across three half-hour episodes the series runs from circus sideshows to German expressionism, through Metropolis, Triumph of the Will and The Wizard of Oz, and on to aspect ratios, Mary Pickford, Deep Throat, the French New Wave and AI. The selection is what a decent survey course would cover, in roughly the order it would cover it, and it’s all pretty accurate (unless it’s total nonsense Cunk is doggedly asserting in an interview, usually to the great irritation of guest Mark Kermode).
In fact the genuine experts are a key reason all of this works, and Cunk puts her questions to 23 of them. Michael Bay and Benedict Cumberbatch are the star bookings, with eager but hapless contributions from Die Hard screenwriter Steven E. de Souza, the composer Daniel Pemberton and the cinematographer Seamus McGarvey.
As well as Kermode, Mark Cousins and Mo Moshaty* feature among the critics interviewed. Cousins made The Story of Film: An Odyssey, so the brief is familiar to him. Horror writer, lecturer and producer Moshaty (who founded and edits NightTide magazine) gets to explain – to Cunk’s bewilderment – how the shower scene of Psycho is edited. Alongside them sits a bench that includes Isabel Stevens of Sight and Sound, Helen O’Hara of Empire, Catherine Bray of Screen International and Bryony Dixon, the BFI’s curator of silent film.
As the man behind Black Mirror, lead writer Brooker has long taken a keen interest in AI. When the BBC announced the series in April he said that “Sora has killed off Hollywood and itself – presumably as part of a murder-suicide pact” (OpenAI had announced the closure of its Sora video app on 24 March, and it went dark on 26 April). But the spectre of AI continues to haunt any assessment of the future of cinema, including here, where Cunk shows a befuddled de Souza a film of Buster Keaton doing BMX tricks.
The bodily fluid gags and smartly idiotic jokes will get the audience to watch, but the genuine history is what they’ll leave with. As one young woman with a California drawl put it to her friend, on the way out of a BFI advance screening: “All that money on tuition, and I coulda just watched this.”
Cunk on Cinema is on BBC Two (Thursdays at 10pm) and BBC iPlayer (all three 30-minute episodes) from 12 November. It is on Netflix outside the UK and Ireland, as six 15-minute episodes, from 15 November.
*Full disclosure – my wife.