...and how Diane Morgan's character was originally supposed to be posh

Charlie Brooker says he has considered making a Black Mirror / Philomena Cunk crossover.

The creator of both shows admitted he had the idea of an episode in which the dimwitted talking head, as played by Diane Morgan, looked into technology, which could fall under both series.

Then he added, half-jokingly: ‘I reserve the right to revisit that thought.’

The two worlds will collide next week, as  a scene in the new mockumentary Cunk On Life features Streamberry, the parody of Netflix that Brooker created for the Black Mirror episode Joan Is Awful last year.

At a preview screening of the feature-length episode earlier this month, Brooker also revealed that Cunk was originally intended to be a middle-class character.

She started life on Booker’s Wipe programmes as a counterpoint to the Barry Shitpeas – as played by director Al Campbell. ‘He was originally a shock comedian who’d just had a successful Edinburgh Fringe show,’ recalled Campbell, who also helmed the new film.

Brooker added that Shipeas had been signed up to front a Channel 4 reality show called Sick On A Widow ‘in which he vomitted on the recently bereaved’.

However, Brooker said the show was criticised for ‘mocking the working class’ because of Campbell’s Estuary accent, so wanted a second talking head, who was described as a ‘middle-class cupcake blogger’.

‘So that's why the character is called Philomena,’ he added. Turning to Morgan, he said: ‘We'd done some auditions, and asking "Would you come in and play this middle class character?" And then you say, "can I just do my own voice?"

Morgan replied:‘Yeah, because I practised my best posh all weekend. Then I thought I might just try to stick to my own [Boltonian] accent, because I thought it might be funny, just for my own amusement.  I really thought this was funner.’

‘So I ruined everything you tried to do,’ she told Brooker.

The team also confirmed that the experts interviewed on the show are all in on the joke, and were asked to be ‘patient and earnest’ with Cunk, however dumb or surreal her questions.

However, not all got into the spirit, as Morgan said: ‘When we first started doing it, there were a couple of nasty ones… They didn’t know what it was they were letting themselves in for.  I think, when you stomp all over someone's favourite topic, not everyone takes it well.’

But she said after recording this film she went for a drink with  all the experts, and called them ‘lovely’. And while she did have one scary encounter while filming Cunk On Life, it was down to a member of the public while filming on one on Las Vegas’s busiest districts.

‘I had to have security on Fremont Street,’ she said. ‘It was so busy, and everyone’s half-naked and pissed. 

‘I was there in my tweed coat, looking like a complete lunatic and one guy, as we were filming, made eye contact while crossing the road, and I thought, "Don't look at him. Don't look at him. Don't don't look him in the eyes". And then I caught his eye.

‘He came over to me, this drunken guy, and I didn't see where he went, but apparently he was going to go for me, and the security guys launched at him as he walking towards us.’

She said that on the raw footage you can see him suddenly disappear from the shot as her bodyguards took him down.

Brooker also commented on how Cunk had developed as a character over the time, saying: ‘I used to say that Philomena was an absence of character, but [no longer, as] we know a bit more about your wider Cunkiverse

‘Also, she's got a bit more, more argumentative. It felt like it's a modern thing that people turn around to an expert and go, "No, I've seen this thing on YouTube, your life’s work is fucking shit."  So there's quite an element of that has crept in.’

He also said that there was a lot of wasted material from the interviews, with often hours of footage shot for just a couple of minute.

Addressing Morgan, he said: ’Sometimes, the two of you go on a riff,  about something, and we're like, "Oh, how do we fit it in?"

‘Now I've learned, since we did Cunk on Earth, that you can also upload clips later to social media out of context, and they work. You don't have to worry about where they sit. 

‘So this time while we were going through the material, instead of just deleted things and dragging into a big burning bin, we were going "We’ll mark that for later".’

And he said when selecting which academics to interview ‘my big question is always, are they too smiley? Are they too happy? I want them to be stern and a bit frightening…  but then you also want a mix.’

• Cunk On Life is on BBC Two at 9pm on Monday.

Published: 27 Dec 2024