Imagine Philomena Cunk Talking to Michael Bay

As Lady Gaga once said, “talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show-stopping, spectacular, never the same, totally unique, completely not ever been done before, unafraid to reference or not reference.” Mother Monster was talking about Ryan Murphy, but she ought to have been talking about Diane Morgan’s TV interviewer-commentator character Philomena Cunk. Bone dry and deviously stupid, Cunk talks to experts, academics, and historians about all manner of topics, absorbing absolutely none of it. It’s been fun to see Cunk chat her way through the sciences (social and otherwise), but later this year, she’ll turn her focus on something much more our speed: cinema. Coming soon to BBC Two (and to Netflix later this year), Cunk on Cinema is a three-part series that reunites Morgan with longtime collaborator Charlie Brooker (of Black Mirror fame) that will allow Morgan-as-Cunk to explore film from its nascent black-and-white days through the French New Wave up to our current moment. She’ll sit down with movie-makers such as director Michael Bay and Benedict Cumberbatch as well as movie critics such as Mark Kermode and Catherine Bray. Cunk/Bay is sort of like Frost/Nixon for our generation, an all-time fake dummy talking to the master of fake-dummy (okay, sometimes real-dummy) cinema, where hopefully she’ll get to the bottom of whether Transformers are real.