Diane Morgan plays Philomena Cunk in new Netflix series

Some kids aspire to be doctors, astronauts, teachers or firefighters. Growing up in Bolton, a former mill town in the north of England, Diane Morgan was interested in one thing: comedy. She watched a lot of it, mostly British. Peter Sellers, “Fawlty Towers,” Monty Python. When she landed in drama school, she told the head of the programme, “’Look, I’m not here for the Shakespeare’ — so they gave me Lady Macbeth, all the big roles,” she recalled in a video chat from her London home. “All these lovely, beautiful girls who wanted to play the ingenues — they hated me because they were like, ‘Why is she getting these parts? She wants to be the stupid maid.’”

Several decades later, Morgan’s commitment to playing the fool has paid off. Since 2013, she has starred as Philomena Cunk, a know-nothing TV pundit, in a series of mockumentaries about history, philosophy, art and science (including “Cunk on Earth”). As she strides through picturesque locations, dressed in tweed, and sits down with distinguished experts from the world of academia, she looks every bit the part of a BBC presenter. Then she does things like ask an Oxford professor, “What was more culturally significant, Beyoncé’s hit ‘Single Ladies’ or the Renaissance period?” and the illusion of gravitas is (hilariously) ruptured.

The latest volume in the “Cunk” canon, “Cunk on Life,” premiered Thursday on Netflix. Cunk remains as deadpan and ill-informed as ever, asking great philosophers and physicists “some of the most significant questions you can ask with a mouth.” In one particularly absurd scene, she tells a renowned British surgeon that only 40% of people have skeletons. Everyone else, she says, is “solid meat.”

Morgan has a remarkable ability to maintain a straight face throughout these interviews. It’s all about the pressure, she says. “I know that as soon as I laugh, it’s not funny.” She admits she does “corpse” — or crack up — on occasion, particularly with certain experts, like Douglas Hedley, a professor of the philosophy of religion at Cambridge University who has become a recurring talking head in the “Cunk” universe. “He talks very slowly, but he’s brilliant. I think the straighter and more serious they are, the more it tickles me,” she says.

The academics who appear in “Cunk” may be aware that Morgan is doing a bit for a comedy program, but they still react to her character’s idiotic questions with genuine shock and exasperation. In the early days, before Cunk became well-known, there was more confusion. “We had some real eggheads, and famously, they don’t watch comedy. Then you trample all over their favorite topic” and things can get tense, she says. One expert grew so irritated they had to pause filming while he calmed down. “I said, ‘Don’t stop if that happens again.’ I was willing for him to punch me, because I thought it would make great TV. If he breaks my nose, it’ll heal.”

“I think they genuinely feel a bit defensive of their subject matter,” says “Cunk on Life” creator Charlie Brooker, who is also the force behind the techno-dystopian anthology series “Black Mirror.” He is usually not physically present when Morgan is filming the interviews because, he says, “I find it too cringe. I would die.” Brooker says Morgan “doesn’t mind an awkward silence, which comes in really handy when she’s doing the interviews, because sometimes they will last an hour, 70% of which is awkward silence.”

The experts, some of whom have become recurring favorites, “seem to really enjoy the fact that they’re there,” Brooker says. “The sad thing is, experts don’t get interviewed on mainstream TV very often anymore.” Over time, Cunk has grown more antagonistic toward the talking heads she interrogates, and more willing to counter their arguments with dubious anecdotal evidence. (“My mate Paul” is one of her most frequently cited sources.) “That feels like a modern-day thing,” Brooker says. “People are less shy these days about saying to an expert, ‘Yeah, whatever, you may have studied this subject for 25 years, but I just watched a video on YouTube which tells me your life’s work is bulls —. I’ll tell you why we didn’t land on the moon, or vaccines don’t work. There’s an arrogant swagger to a lot of the alternative truth crowd.

Tribune News Service