Cunkadelic:Cunk On Britain.

"Now we've got our country back, what actually is it? Who are we and why?" - Philomena Cunk

The news is pretty depressing at the moment and in the run up to Christmas I wanted some light relief from it all so I went back and re-watched Cunk In Britain (BBC2/iPlayer, first aired April/May 2018 - but with a Xmas episode from December 2016 bundled up on the iPlayer with it) and I wasn't disappointed. I smirked, I sniggered, I giggled, and I laughed out loud. If only there was a shorter way of saying 'laugh out loud'.

Created by Charlie Brooker, Cunk (always played by Diane Morgan) began her life on his excellent Weekly Wipe but proved so popular it was perhaps inevitable that she'd branch out and do her own thing (though, thankfully - judging by the dire Mandy sitcom, Brooker stayed on as writer here). In the unlikely event that you don't know the format, Cunk is a dim witted, ill-informed, and sometimes downright rude investigative journalist and in this series she's guiding us through Britain's history.

Episode one alone takes in the Big Bang, evolution, the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Romans, the Dark Ages, the Vikings, 1066 (and all that), Magna Carta, the Black Death, and the Tudors and the final episode starts with the Beatles and the 1966 World Cup before leading us through the Common Market, the Troubles, punk (featuring key punk band The Wombles), Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands War, Britpop, Tony Blair, war in Iraq, Gordon Brown, the financial crisis, David Cameron, Brexit, and the seemingly never ending Tory shitshow which we now all live under the shadow of. In the middle there are of course wars and plagues and all that old stuff.

Cunk wanders around famous/iconic locations (the white cliffs of Dover, Stonehenge, the Scottish highlands, Bath, a service station near Oxford, the Cerne Abbas giant (how people sent dick pics before Snapchat), the Clifton suspension bridge, Albert Dock in Liverpool, the Giant's Causeway, Blackpool, a branch of Sainsbury's Local and, in London, St Paul's Cathedral, the Natural History Museum, the Barbican, Hampton Court, and the Imperial War Museum) and interviews various professors and doctors including some you might recognise:- Robert Peston, Jay Rayner, Ronald Hutton, Chris Packham, Howard Goodall, Mark Lawson, and, ugh, Neil Oliver.

To be fair, they're all good sports. I'm not sure how much they've been briefed in advance but they manage to keep, with one exception, straight faces as Cunk asks them incredibly daft questions:-

Why was John Major called The Prince of Onions?

Where did the Romans come from?

How many cities did the Great Fire of London burn down?

How long would you get off work if you got the Black Death?

How many three wise men were there?

Elsewhere, there are some tittersome turns of phrase and humorously ludicrous ideas. Human beings were so scared of dinosaurs they didn't dare to exist until they'd all gone, William Wallace's decapitated head on a spike on London Bridge is a "gory Scottish Pez", Sir Walter Raleigh was a great sailor (and invented the potato) but is now only remembered for his pushbikes, ectoplasm is "ghost jizz", and Charles II had a head, unlike Charles I, but unfortunately he had the head of Boycie from Only Fools And Horses.

There's more sperm related humour when it comes to Queen Mary ("there's something about Mary - but not funny like Cameron Diaz with all dried spunk in her hair"). Cunk calls stone age tools "boring" and shit", she asks a historian who his favourite one of the Mr Men is (Mr Tickle - good call), thinks that Charles Darwin invented the monkey, calls Winston Churchill's speeches "stirring and powerfully erotic", and critiques George Orwell's 1984 for not foreseeing Band Aid or Ghostbusters.

There's a regular appearance of the opening credits of the Karl Howman sitcom Brush Strokes - clearly THE pivotal event in ALL British history - and there's lots of other silliness. Quite often getting the names of people and events wrong. These bits are not hilarious but they're not terrible. Calling the Bayeux Tapestry the Baywatch Tapestry or the flag the Onion Jack and suggesting King Arthur came a lot (Camelot).

Elsewhere we're told the stories of Will.I.Am Shakespeare, Napoleon Cumberbatch, Lady Diana Frank Spencer, Arthur Scarface, Major John, Tony Blur, Sir Arthur Conan Roddy Doyle, and Emmerdale Pankhurst. That last one's pretty good actually and Cunk On Britain is pretty good too. It does an excellent job of skewering the tropes and the pomposity of historical television documentaries but, more than that, it's just a good excuse to make some very rude and some very silly jokes and sometimes that's all you need.