Diane Morgan on playing Philomena Cunk: 'People can't see the funny side of Brexit'

The irreverent character made her debut on Charlie Brooker series Weekly Wipe. Now she's been handed her very own spin-off, Cunk on Britain. Next stop? Donald Trump

Interviewing someone who is famous for being the one who asks questions is a rather strange scenario, especially when those questions include: “Where in Britain did the Romans come from?”, “How did Sir Walter Raleigh invent the potato?” and “Who is your favourite member of One Direction?”.

For just over half a decade, Diane Morgan has been the face of said question-poser: the brutally honest and comically uneducated Philomena Cunk. Taking over the screen with mockumentaries about William Shakespeare and Christmas, she’s now been granted a full-blown spin-off series that tackles the whole country, called Cunk on Britain.

Charlie Brooker, back when he was better known for fronting Weekly Wipe as opposed to Channel 4-turned-Netflix series Black Mirror, introduced Morgan's character into his comedy review show alongside fellow joke persona Barry Shitpeas.

“They were going to have a posh Philomena Cunk,” admits Morgan. “She was an idiot, but she was posh, hence Philomena. Sounds quite posh, doesn’t it? I think they were worried that if it was a working-class accent it would look as if we were sort of taking the piss out of working-class accents.”

She continues: “So I went in, did my best posh, but said: ‘Can I also try it in my own accent because I think it’ll be funnier?’ And they let me.”

Since then, the 42-year-old has relished the freedom she’s been granted to express herself in a role most British comedy actors could only dream of.

“[I] absolutely love it,” she proclaims, “because I can say anything. You can basically do no wrong as Philomena. It’s like you’ve been given free rein to just do whatever you want. If you’re bored, you can yawn, say whatever you want, and act however you want. You don’t have to be good socially, you don’t have to think of the right thing to say. It’s lovely, it’s really comfy.”

It’s that same lack of limitations that Morgan believes makes Cunk such a funny character. It’s not just the fact she has a down-to-earth personality and a Northern accent.

“I think it’s someone who’s entirely free and honest. Completely honest. She’s sort of how we’d all like to be - if we had the balls.”

“I’d say there’s a little smidgen of Stan Laurel in there,” she adds when asked who she might compare Cunk to. “There’s probably someone I went to school with there too.

“It’s almost like it’s the real me. I think if you chuck away all the social niceties and whatever I’ve got that’s meant to keep me safe, that’s what you’d be left with."

The dialogue in Cunk on Britain is mostly scripted – if you listen closely you can hear the essence of creator Brooker seeping through – but Morgan is allowed to let her improvisation run wild when it comes to the aforementioned interviews, which she says is definitely her favourite part of the job.

These segments see her sit down for approximately two hours with each 'victim,' hilariously asking irrelevant questions to waste their time on topics some have dedicated their whole life to; which is then whittled down into tiny snippets.

It’s a complete send-up of the run-of-the-mill science and history documentaries you might see Brian Cox presenting - a previous victim himself.

But now “the cat is out of the bag” with most people are aware of the situation, Morgan admits. Although some less cultured folk remain confused, she enjoys watching them squirm.

“I’m not sure how much TV they watch,” she laughs. “They might have had someone try to explain what it is, but they’re still not sure and you can feel that when they turn up. You can see that they don’t really know what’s going on.

“But then other people are fans of the show and are willing to play along. It’s still nice to watch.”

With the latest series underway, Morgan is looking beyond the British Isles for Cunk’s next adventure – she jokes that it’d be nice to be somewhere with a warmer climate.

“So I was thinking I go to America. I think that would work, conquering America. Because they’re so upbeat and positive and polite.”

Now she’s too famous to surprise her UK interviewees, the US might be the perfect place she can start afresh – almost like a British version of Borat, with a tad less controversy.

“Let’s interview Trump. That’d be great, wouldn’t it? Cunk on Trump. That’d be a dream interview.”

Although she concedes the American Presidency is a topic they can broach, there is another political nightmare Cunk won’t touch: the EU referendum.

“You could probably tackle anything [apart from Brexit]," she says. “People get so heated about it and can’t see the funny side, I think. And plus, everything’s been said. It must be really difficult to come up with new jokes about Brexit.”

Still, the series features a couple of sly hints within the series about “taking our country back” but they hardly delve into the topic. And “that’s enough”, according to her.

Morgan first appeared as Cunk on Charlie Brooker series 'Weekly Wipe' (BBC)

When Morgan isn’t gallivanting around the “freezing” Scottish Highlands, she is appearing in sitcoms, such as Motherland, or teaming up with comedy partner-in-crime Joe Wilkinson. The pair have previously devised live and recorded sketches for their duo Two Episodes of Mash, and have just rounded off a new series called The Archiveologists, where they both add commentary to old BBC stock footage.

“We might try and do more sketches,” she says. “Whether people will like them or not, I don’t know.”

“I’ve always wanted to do a sketch show. And they’ve sort of gone out of fashion for a bit, or they’ve just stopped doing them for whatever reason. [But] it’d be nice to do something with Joe where we get to be silly. It’s sort of serial sketches, what we used to do, and it’d be nice to get back to doing a bit of that.”

Looking ahead, Morgan - having banked the experience of playing a character someone else has created - is now broadening her horizons and looking to step into the driver’s seat with her own ideas.

“I’d love to try and write something myself. I am trying to write something and it’s killing me, it’s so hard,” she levels. “I’ve only written stand-up and sketch before, so writing something long-form on my own is proving quite difficult. But I’m enjoying it as well."

She tells me it’s to do with ownership. While it’s nice to be able to work on projects you enjoy, it means so much more when it’s something you’ve created yourself.

“With Cunk and everything else, you have to film things and then just hand it over and someone else chops it up and decides which were the best bits,” she says.

“But it’d be nice for me to do something where I’d go ‘no I’d like to do it like this’ and have full control over everything. Just to see if I could do it.”

Cunk on Britain is on BBC Two every Tuesday night at 10pm. Episode 1 is on BBC iPlayer.