Karl Puschmann: Like nothing on Earth

There’s always the chance that I was missing the joke. But I’m sure that wasn’t the case. After all, Netflix’s new mockumentary Cunk on Earth only really has two. Three, if you count the sudden, random appearance of the music video for Technotronic’s 90s banger Pump Up the Jam.

The series, which has been hailed as the next entry into TV’s cult canon, is ostensibly a history of civilisation. That’s an ambitious goal that has stumped even the most brilliant of minds over the centuries and contains a lot more information than you could reasonably hope to ever get across in five half-hour episodes.

In this regard, Cunk On Earth shoots for the moon - literally in its last episode where it dives into the cold war and the space race. The show is a mockumentary and can be considered a less sarcastic or mean version of The Ali G Show mixed with a typical documentary series.

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The big difference between Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy creation Ali G, and Diane Morgan’s droll Philomena Cunk is that during the interview components of the show she aims to only leave her subjects in total, head-scratching bewilderment while he settled for nothing less than hoisting them on their own petard.

Of course, here Cunk isn’t interviewing politicians or lawmakers who often had it coming. Instead, she’s quizzing experts in things like philosophy, Roman civilisation and ancient tragedy. Confronted with her baffling questions, assured ignorance and nonsensical malapropisms, these professors and doctors are left to gamely attempt to fashion some form of answer.

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“Did the Mesopotamians have any of the same things that we have today?” she asks the fantastically beardy Dr Irving Finkel, whose job title is assistant keeper of ancient script at the British Museum.

“Yes,” he nods. “Weapons. Jewellery. Temples. Animals.”

“Oh, right” Cunk answers, disinterested. “I meant like feet and eyebrows.”

“Yes, they did,” he replies, seemingly unfazed.

“So they had the same number of holes and everything?” she prods.

“As far as science is in a position to reassure you,” Irving replies, “Yes.”

That’s joke number one. Cunk asking experts ridiculous questions. Sometimes they hit, like this exchange. Sometimes they miss, like when she posits that there are no movies based on cave art because “they couldn’t get the rights anyway”.

There’s been some chatter about whether these people are “in” on the joke. Confronted by someone so absolutely, ridiculously clueless you’d have to think that even if they weren’t, these brainiacs would be quick to clock what was going on. To their credit, they all take her at face value and patiently explain why her mate’s story about getting a potato stuck up his bum isn’t comparable to a Greek tragedy and that it wasn’t the great philosopher Aristotle who said “dance like nobody’s watching”.

The second joke is Cunk walking around stand-ins for historically important sites while insisting that the history of the world is actually “boring”.

As she strolls around some ancient ruins she says: “It’s hard to believe I’m walking through the ruins of the first-ever city. Because I’m not. That’s in Iraq, which is miles away and f***ing dangerous.”

Well, she’s not wrong. These sections are mostly funny. But the problem is that you quickly learn to anticipate the gag. That’s the problem with only having two.

Nevertheless, Cunk is a great character and the show does offer goofy entertainment. Even if I enjoyed it more in short doses. In between her monotone delivery and bewildering questions, Morgan also allows moments of vulnerability and hard truths to occasionally crack through the nonsense. She’s dry and clearly absurd, but also a more rounded character than Ali G could ever have hoped to be.

The show moves at a quick pace, constantly flinging fantastically silly jokes and never lingering on any one expert for too long. Even still, its repetition does get tiresome as the series cycles between its two jokes. If it’s true that history always repeats, then in this way Cunk on Earth successfully mirrors its ambitious subject.