Cunk on Britain (TV Mini Series) Cunk on Christmas (2016) User Reviews

Seasonal fun.

[Sleepin_Dragon · 8/10 · 24 September 2022]

Reporter Philomena Cunk takes a look at The history of Christmas, explaining the origins of Father Christmas, and looking at the traditions that remain in place even today.

Diane Morgan is just an absolute delight, and once again we get to see the zany Philomena Cunk explain events from an interesting view point, I love the character, she's incredible funny. Seeing the adverts and old footage brought back some memories.

Some interesting interviews once again, Marco Pierre White looked stunned each time he appeared, it was very funny.

I love watching this episode annually when I'm wrapping my Christmas presents, it's a super light-hearted, funny look at the season of good will and tinsel.

Super funny, posing such questions, as will Santa be allowed in The UK after Christmas. Favourite aspect had to be her interviews with the kids, those were hilarious.

8/10.

Extends a skit into an episode really well with great writing and delivery

[bob the moo · 1 January 2017]

Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) is maybe best known for being part of the Screen Wipe segments along with other fictional everyman, Barry Shitpeas. This led to her having her own segments within Charlie Brooker's shows (Moments of Wonder) and in this last year a couple of standalone shows; the first of these I saw was this Christmas Special. Within it Cunk talks with experts and wonders out loud about things such as the best food for Christmas, the history of the celebration, who is Santa, and what the best Christmas movie is.

The character herself is quite simple, and essentially the joke could be that she is ignorant and the focus then be on watching the experts trying to deal with that (in the mold of Ali G for instance); however what makes her much more than that is just how well scripted she is, whether it be great phrasing, great observations, or small moments of madness delivered with wide-eyed wonder. Taking us on a "journey right up Christmas", there are plenty of great lines and I did laugh fairly consistently across the 30 minutes. The closing observations are a good example of the sharp edge it has too – she talks about how we are encouraged to feel sorry for those people alone at Christmas, but now that's all of us and its brilliant.

Very enjoyable Christmas special thanks to the writing and Morgan's delivery; it was shown paired with Charlie Brooker's 2016 Wipe, and the humor is very much in the same area.

Her routine quickly got old and repetitive

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 23 November 2017]

"Cunk on Christmas" is a British half-hour television special from last year (2016) and Diane Morgan reprises her trademark role Philomena Cunk, a younger female poor man's version of Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge basically, even if it appeared far from as many times in programs as Partridge did. And yet it got stale very quickly. While I still somewhat enjoyed the take on Shakespeare, this one here stopped making an impact on me before the 10-minute mark. The reason is it is always the same. It's basically Cunk making parallels between old Christmas traditions and references and new pop culture references like when she compares Jesus' popularity to Beyoncé. Enough said I think. This describes the comedy here fairly well. As does the character's last name, which is definitely not a coincidence with what happens when you change one latter (props to you if you think of "dunk" when reading this review). Besides, I found the interviews executed very shoddily, she could definitely learn a lot from SBC (Ali G.) there. I still wondered to what extent the interviewees understood this was all a setup. Oh well, actually I don't really care. And finally as there are many informative mentions and moments, I would not call it a mockumentary really. What you hear in here is 100% all the time, the shame is how it is interrupted by try-hard shots at humor that are not working half as often as they wanted to. Cunk passed the peak and it's best to retire her after this one. I was not entertained well here and give it a thumbs-down. Don't watch.