‘Historian’s’ pristine mockery of the BBC blows everything away
Complete ignorance, complete prejudice, and all the self-awareness of a brick. Diane Morgan is turning history on its head. But a warning: You’ll laugh so hard you may injure an organ | WATCH
Who doesn’t love a good documentary when some old English professor is narrating it in hushed tones?
Icons like Simon Schama and David Starkey – those pompous, delightful old bores – traipsing through the tombs of Henry VIII and whoever.
The late, great Sister Wendy, the most unusual host of any television show ever, running around the great art galleries of the world in her wimple.
There are more modern incarnations such as the pixie-like Lucy Worsley going through the halls of Catherine the Great’s Russia in oldy-time costume (great series by her on Netflix on the Romanovs, check it out).
And then there is nature’s narrator, Sir David Attenborough. May he never leave the jungle.
Well, time for all those nerds to all get out of the way – because Philomena Cunk is taking this class.
British comedian Diane Morgan’s history professor alter ego has launched onto Netflix in the past week with her five-part series Cunk on Earth – and, gosh, she does history very differently.
Morgan – a Mancunian with the most deadpan expression in the world – will be familiar to fans of British comedy quiz shows and Ricky Gervais’s After Life. And she’s fabulous in a BBC comedy about working mums called Motherland.
But here as the historian to end all historians, she blows everything away. Just listen to this:
“When we think of Empire we all think of the big one – Star Wars! … and Rome. And this is history, so it’s Rome unfortunately,” she exclaims.
That’s the tone you can expect from this historian. Complete ignorance, complete prejudice, and all the self-awareness of a brick.
She’s one of us, really.
Cunk in this Netflix extravaganza spends her time interviewing real-time experts on philosophy, history, science and arts the big questions like: Did the Neanderthals have the same bits as us? What did Aristotle mean when he said “Dance like nobody’s watching”?
Morgan’s ability to just say the most ridiculous things to very serious Oxford and Cambridge academics – who must be in on the joke but never give it away with their monotone responses – will break most of your organs you’ll laugh so much.
When she finally meets one professor who can’t help but break, Morgan never does.
Morgan really is on a winner here. History is very much in vogue in the world of streaming.
The Schama-style history doco with elongated vowels and long-dead royals galore are mainstays of every streamer these days.
And the biggest podcast in the world – which you all must listen to immediately, because it is totally brilliant – is, of course, The Rest is History, with those other British documentary star presenters, Oxford’s own Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.
She so perfectly inhabits the tweed and the tone of these professors, and then turns it all on its head.
And every detail of Cunk on Earth is pristine in its mockery of the BBC doco too. The big sweeping nature shots, the sudden jumps to ancient ruins, the costumes, even the way the interviews with the academics are filmed.
Morgan and her team have nailed it in every direction. You’d hope Schama and Starkey and Worsley and co would have a good laugh at themselves if they saw this.
And hey, you might learn something from Philomena Cunk, too.
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Isn’t it rough getting to the end of your twenties?
You’re not as rich as everyone else, you’re not as pretty as you were five years earlier, and everyone is constantly travelling overseas while you feel stuck.
Not to mention that your younger brother is getting married to the girl he’s been with since he was 14, and your mother and father aren’t even bothering to ask if you’re bringing a date to the wedding. Everyone knows the answer is “nope”.
OK, maybe the last one is a personal thing.
But the general gist is your mid-to-late 20s are rubbish, and that is the abiding message of the brilliant new show Extraordinary on Disney Plus.
Mairead Tyers is the Irish girl who can’t hold down a job, whose handsome friend-with-benefits (a slimy, Hugh Grant-esque Ned Porteous) won’t date her properly, and whose annoying little sister (Safia Oakley-Green) is so much better at her than everything.
And to add all that disappointment, Tyers doesn’t have any superpowers.
Yes, in the world of Extraordinary, everybody in Britain all of a sudden has developed Marvel-like magic abilities overnight, except for our heroine.
Tyer’s mother – Siobhan McSweeney, best known as the marvellous dry nun Sister Michael in Derry Girls – can control technology with her mind, if only she understood how tech worked.
The best mate – a hilariously skittish Sofia Oxenham – is a conduit with the dead, who likes to channel Hitler at dinner parties so everyone can hurl abuse at him.
And then there’s the poor little tabby cat Tyers takes home in the first episode.
Except this is no tabby cat, it’s a rather odd fella (Luke Rollson) who turned into a feline on a night out at the footy and forgot how to transform back.
Yes, it’s a rather sweet pastiche of a world obsessed with Marvel movies and Avengers and Black Panthers and whatever.
But Tyers really does rise this story above a basic superpower gimmick.
She captures the pain and patheticness, the hilarity and helplessness, of coming out of your teens and asking, as Peggy Lee put so perfectly, “Is that all there is?”
There are pratfalls and pandemonium for our heroine in Extraordinary.
Flying in the arms of her Superman-like bed buddy through the night sky just as she’s trying to quit him, and seeing her other lover shockingly transfigure into little creatures whenever he sees her with no top on, for instance.
But we also want to cry with Tyers when she seeks out a “superpower clinic” to help her fly like everyone else.
It’s a heavy-handed metaphor, but isn’t it just like going on an intensive diet or to rehab or night school because you just want to fit in?
Tyers is going to be a star after starring in Extraordinary, with her comrades Oxenham and Rollson also worthy of big-time careers.
Their comic timing and their true superpower – pulling at our heart-strings – is world class. And how good to see McSweeney on our screens again.
Anyone who likes Extraordinary’s funny Irish lassies needs to rush right afterwards to Netflix, so they can devour McSweeney’s Sister Michael and her Derry Girls in their last series. Between Tyers, McSweeney, the Derry Girls, and Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters (Apple TV), we are all living in the shining era of the Emerald Isle queens of comedy. How lucky we are.
Extraordinary is streaming on Disney Plus.
Cunk on Earth is streaming on Netflix.
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