Diane Morgan's deadpan send-up of BBC documentaries is pitch-perfect: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Cunk On Cinema

Cunk On Cinema (BBC2) 

Rating:

Who'd have thought it? Philomena Cunk, TV's most clueless presenter, who once claimed Game Of Thrones was Shakespeare's greatest play and thought Russia was part of the Soviet Onion, actually knows something about film history.

Between the malapropisms and mispronunciations, obscene puns and plain silliness, Cunk On Cinema displayed flashes of genuine knowledge of how film evolved – and was all the funnier for it.

So far, her three-part celebration of the movies has taken us from the almost accidental discovery of moving pictures to the heyday of the Hollywood musicals... not to mention Nazi propaganda films. 

'Who played Adolf Hitler?' she wondered.

She told us how cinema's first thriller, 1903's The Great Train Robbery, ended with a bandit firing a gun straight into the camera, and explained the psychological theory behind film-editing, which led to Sergei Eisenstein's seminal Battleship Potemkin.

For all her apparent stupidity, Philomena (played with a wonderful, dead-eyed sourness by Diane Morgan) repeatedly skewers the pretentious, the self-absorbed and the professional know-it-alls.

Even though film critic Mark Kermode was in on the joke, he couldn't help bristling when La Cunk insisted on referring to Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece Metropolis as Metro Police. 

To prove him wrong, she produced her phone and asked ChatGPT, 'How do you pronounce Metro Police?'

Benedict Cumberbatch managed better at suppressing his irritation when she greeted him, 'Hello, who are you?' 

When his name meant nothing to her, he helpfully ran through a few of his biggest films, before she decided she must have seen him in Tesco Express, 'looking at chickpeas'.

Philomena's caption described her as a 'landmark documentary presenter', and her send-up of this sacred Beeb genre never grows old. 

Some of the targets were easy: all she had to do was sit in the red pews of an empty cinema and gaze in rapt wonder at the screen, and she was satirising every lazy programme about cinema ever made. 

No wonder Mr Kermode looked so uneasy.

Talking about the first Hollywood film to feature sound, The Jazz Singer, she criticised its star, Al Jolson, for using 'blackface'. 

'It's the sort of cultural insensitivity,' Ms Cunk commented, in her trademark deadpan delivery, 'that today would lead to him being cancelled... or given an hour-long Netflix stand-up special'.

Her narration is a pitch-perfect parody of sententious BBC voiceovers. 

'Humankind', she informed us, gazing wistfully towards the horizon, 'has been responsible for some incredible achievements: conquering the landscape, growing the Great Wall of Chinese, discovering Mona Lisa and inventing global warming'.

But the best gag of all was plain slapstick. 

Recreating the shot in Steamboat Bill, Jr, when Buster Keaton is unscathed as a house falls on him, she was flattened. Keaton himself would have cracked a smile.