Cunk On...

Is British comedy chasing its own tail?

As Cunk On Britain reaches the series' halfway line, we start to yawn...

Diane Morgan, the comedian who plays Cunk, has a lolling sort of a drawl that makes anything she says sound at least telling. You could easily sit through her presenting a documentary about sausages or sweets.

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Sky has obviously made Urban Myths in order to seem cool and up to the minute, like Netflix or Ryan Murphy, who makes Feud and American Crime Story, but it feels like Tesco Everyday Value to his Fortnum & Mason.

Philomena Cunk's 10 funniest moments

Philomena Cunk is back on television, effing the ineffable as she ponders the great questions. Questions such as "What is clocks?", "Who was Churchill?" and "Why did Elizabeth I happen?"

The blissfully stupid Philomena Cunk explores Tudors, Georgians and the civil war, covering everyone from Henry VIII and his "chronic wife addiction" to Will.i.am Shakespeare and Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins: "His method was foolproof, which was handy, because it had to be done by village idiots."

Cunk on Britain, in which history is told at us by dumb people, has been done before, of course - among others, Daisy Donovan and Ali G played the faux-naif ingenue, targeting talking-head experts with wildly varying levels of malice. And done before, anciently before, with Sellar and Yeatman's 1066 and All That, published in 1930 to frankly bemused shouts of weeping, gleeful mirth from all England's minor public schools.

But Diane Morgan, who has proved she's hardly a one-trick pony with her winningly cynical foil to Anna Maxwell Martin in Motherland, is the best yet. Not sure whether even her supreme deadpan can sustain all the expert interviewees - at some point even Diane's got to crack up - but many lines just zinged. Of the Bayeux Tapestry: "Like a Game of Thrones season finale drawn by an eight-year-old boy." Or: "It's just like being there, but in wool."

TV review, Cunk on Britain (BBC2)

A brilliant puncturing of television histories.

Philomena Cunk, the breath-takingly dim-witted arts and history presenter, ought to do a series on classical music, when she's finished her moronic survey of our island race, in Cunk On Britain (BBC2). That might take some time, since she began with the Big Bang, in an account that promises to travel 'from ancient man to Ed Sheeran'.

Cunk, played with a face as cold and immobile as a side of mutton by Motherland actress Diane Morgan, is a send-up of every self-regarding TV personality who ever recited a script while standing on a windswept cliff-edge and gazing portentiously at the horizon.

'She's like an idiot twin sister,' says Morgan. 'Occasionally she'll get things so right you think maybe she isn't an idiot. Maybe she's a genius.'

The TV in-jokes wear a bit thin. But her malapropisms are hilarious: when she talks about the king of the dinosaurs, 'T'yrannical sawdust rex', or the 'Baywatch tapestry', she's in the great comic tradition of Joyce Grenfell and Dame Edna.

The professors and historians facing her pea-brained questions evidently knew what to expect, and played along. Ronald Hutton and Neil Oliver were trying not to giggle -- but full marks to the lady at the National Archives who talked to Cunk like a weary primary schoolteacher.

No, she explained patiently, the Domesday Book isn't cursed. Perhaps they're used to daft questions at the National Archives.

Cunk on Britain review

The success of Cunk as a character is not thanks to her general persona as an ill-informed pundit, but her bizarre turns of phrase.

Cunk on Britain, episode 1 review

Diane Morgan delivers her lines with a face so straight you could use it as a spirit level.

Cunk on Britain review

Giving Cunk more space could have been a risk, but her bloody-minded daftness leaves you wanting more.