BBC show Cunk on Earth is witty, droll—and it shows why the mockumentary is here to stay

British actor Diane Morgan as Philomena Cunk.

Cunk on Earth, streaming on Netflix, is the history lesson you didn’t know you needed. Over five short half-hour episodes, “landmark documentary presenter” Philomena Cunk, played by English actor and comedian Diane Morgan, takes you through the history of Earth, since the dawn of civilisation right up till now, when we sit tapping on our phones.

Cunk travels around the globe, she talks to historians and academics and she puts things in context. Mostly hers. But before all that, just so you’re clear about where Earth is, she says, “it’s the planet that I am literally on right now”; and the one that you, “unless you’re watching her on a long-haul flight or while falling off a building”, are on too.

With this quip appearing five seconds into the first episode, Cunk on Earth wastes no time in becoming what it is meant to be: A delightful, zany mockumentary that takes on the history documentary format through the lens of one of the most droll comedic personalities ever invented in Philomena Cunk.

Created by Charlie Brooker, the man who gave us Black Mirror, Cunk on Earth is the spark notes version of world history—because who has the attention span for anything longer these days—but is imbued with the unique concerns, both petty and profound, of Cunk, your average “idiot” with the curiosity of a firefly and the conviction of a bull.

Cunk begins by taking a tour of prehistoric civilisations, critiquing cave paintings and surveying the ruins of Pompeii to come to the conclusion that people back then lay around all day in their shockingly dusty homes. She then turns to the origins of Christianity, wondering how the hay and pubes weren’t set on fire as Jesus, with his glowing ring around his head, was being born in a stable.

She also gets into Islam, but because she decides to improvise it, with her script now in the wind, that content is not available in your territory (which is all 190 countries in which Netflix is currently streaming). In the third episode, she travels from the “darkages”, which she suspects sounds like a symptom for something quite horrible, into the Renaissance, whose chief architects—Da Vinci, Galileo, Beethoven and Co—do not impress her much.

Cunk then tackles the Industrial revolution, the rise of machines, and America. In the final episode, she takes on a lot, with Russia and the Cold War, the Space Race and the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, computers or “the abacuses of the modern age”, smartphones and the Internet or, what Cunk wisely calls, the “web wide world”.

All through this journey, leaping through space and time, Cunk is one with her target audience, and at pains to make her content relatable. Out come a volley of pop cultural references. Julius Caesar is the most famous Roman since Polanski. Christianity was like the fiddle spinner of the mediaeval times. The Berlin Wall was sort of “like divorce, but with bricks”. The Apple Macintosh was the first “inherently smug computer ever made.” There must be a hundred more of these in the two and a half hours of Cunk on Earth.

Your theories and questions about mankind’s history are hers too. “Which was more culturally significant,” she asks of one of the many accomplished individuals with impressive titles and degrees that she is tasked with interviewing, “the Renaissance or 'Single Ladies' by Beyonce?” Still another academic is asked, “Was Christ the first victim of cancel culture?” Another thoughtfully put question—“What is the Soviet Onion?”—triggers a straight-faced conversation about the vegetables that the “pheasants” of agrarian Russia grew. Were there turnips, she asks, concern writ large across her face.

Cunk on Earth’s real genius lies the way Philomena Cunk is written and essayed. She mispronounces words (“Bibble”) all the time, her research isn’t the most thorough, she arrives at the most remarkable moments of human history with a certain blandness, and remains oblivious to the bewilderment and bemusement she leaves in her wake, as she blazes down this path most trodden by legends like David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, even Liam Neeson.

That obliviousness is something Cunk has in common with some of the most memorable characters leading the sharpest mockumentaries made in film and television history: David Brent, Janine Teagues, Michael Scott, Leslie Knope, Borat Sagdiyev, Phil Dunphy are all just regular people going about their ordinary lives and jobs, their hubris often being the most striking thing about them.

They talk like we do when we think we have a smidgen of privacy, but they do it, often voluntarily, on the record. It’s totally believable and stupefying at once. It’s why the mockumentary—which takes the serious documentary format, with all its bells and whistles like the steadicam and talking heads, into (mostly) satirical terrain—continues to resonate, decades after it was first invented.

Orson Welles’ 1938 radio play, based on HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, is widely recognised as the first example of a mockumentary in the English-speaking world. So deadpan was his delivery of a fake news broadcast that many people tuning in did, in fact, believe that Earth was about to be invaded by a genocidal Martian army.

In 1964, A Hard Day’s Night tapped into Beatlemania with a scripted film about 36 hours in the lives of the band members, as they prepared for a television performance. Richard Lester’s joke landed, and this film remains influential on the music film canon. But the mockumentary truly entered pop culture 20 years later, with Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap, a “rockumentary” that follows a fictional British heavy metal band on a rock tour, warts and all.

Then, in 2001, Ricky Gervais created David Brent, that irritating office manager we all know. By 2005, the American adaptation of The Office had arrived, with Brent’s alter ego Michael Scott (played by the inimitable Steve Carrell), raising the stupidity stakes. For eight years, we were privy to the goings-on of a paper retailing office in Scranton, Pennsylvania: The power plays, the burnouts, the office parties and romances, at a time when paper was losing its market value on an hourly basis.

With The Office, the mockumentary became a particularly favourite vehicle for workplace comedy; led by self-important folks trying to achieve the extraordinary in very ordinary jobs. Parks & Recreation premiered in 2009, by which time Amy Poehler had established herself as a comedian to watch out for, especially in the “cool mom” subgenre. Her Leslie Knope is an overly earnest public servant who has stock photos of America’s great female leaders on her mantelpiece and dreams of joining them there one day. The fact that she’s surrounded by people who do not share her ambition—who some might call realists—is lost on her.

The schoolteachers of Quinta Brunson’s Abbott Elementary have to similarly endure the extra eagerness of Janine Teagues—but at the end of the day, grudgingly acknowledge that she does get the job done. The award-winning series, now in its second season, has been seen as proof that neither the workplace comedy nor the mockumentary’s influence is fading any time soon.

But the other reason that the mockumentary continues to be wildly popular is its capaciousness; the format lends itself exceedingly well no matter what the subject is. It is as amenable to a Kazakh journalist on a mission to figure out America once and for all (Borat, 2006) as it is to painting an evolving portrait of the modern American family (Modern Family, 2009-2020); or even the life and times of three vampires who struggle to keep up with their duties and everyday life in New York (What We Do In The Shadows, 2019).

Indian experiments with the mockumentary have been few and far between, and most of it is a product of the streaming era. In 2009, Kunal Roy Kapoor and Anuvab Pal put together The President is Coming, a mockumentary based on their play, which has six young men and women compete for a position to shape ‘The New India’ and meet US President Bush.

In 2016, comedians Naveen Richard and Sumukhi Suresh created their YouTube series, Better Life Foundation, which looks inside an NGO dedicated to social and environmental issues, located in North-East India. There’ve been other, less successful attempts, such as Not Fit by Dice Media, and an Indian version of The Office that lasted for just two seasons. Maybe it’s to do with a predominant sense of humour that leans towards the slapstick; or maybe we just don’t know how to land a situational comedy yet—but we continue to await a worthy Indian mockumentary.

But elsewhere in the world, the mockumentary continues to thrive. As Cynthia Miller, an American cultural critic, writes in the 2012 book, Studies in American Humour, mockumentaries “refuse to let us look away from our most cherished notions about reality.” Cunk on Earth, for instance, ends with a meditation on whether we (and wasps) are all stuck inside a computer simulation. It’s a decidedly existential note, and a conspiracy theory we’ve all pondered upon. And therein perhaps lies the greatest achievement of the mockumentary: It’s fake, it’s funny, but above all, it demonstrates that there’s a vast gap between the truth and reality.