Diane Morgan's Philomena Cunk is returning to explain cinema to us idiots, and honestly, we need it.
The BBC and Netflix have announced Cunk on Cinema, the latest installment in Morgan's brilliantly deadpan mockumentary series. If you've never encountered Cunk - and you should fix that immediately - imagine if the world's most confident moron got a documentary series. Morgan plays her with such commitment that you occasionally forget it's satire.
What makes Cunk work is the precision of the joke. She's not just dumb - she's specifically, hilariously wrong in ways that accidentally reveal truths. Her interviews with actual academics and experts, who struggle to respond to her aggressively stupid questions, are comedy gold. "What is the point of clouds?" she once asked a meteorologist, with the earnestness of someone genuinely seeking knowledge.
Applying this to cinema history should be perfect. Film criticism is pretentious enough to deserve mockery, reverent enough that watching Cunk misunderstand it will be delicious. I'm already imagining her explaining the French New Wave or asking Martin Scorsese why he doesn't make happy films.
The genius of Morgan's performance is that Cunk never winks at the audience. She commits completely to being the smartest dumb character on television. It's a high-wire act that shouldn't work - playing stupid is usually the laziest comedy - but Morgan makes it sing through sheer force of commitment and perfect writing.
Cunk on Cinema won't change your life, but it'll make you laugh while teaching you absolutely nothing about film history. Sometimes that's exactly what you need. In Hollywood, nobody knows anything - especially not Philomena Cunk, which is precisely the point.
