It's hard to imagine believing her for very long, and some of her interviewees seem to catch on that they're being had. But Morgan always proceeds as if in deadly earnest, writes SpencerKlavan.
takes off certain educational programs familiar to British viewers. The narrator — usually David Attenborough or someone like him — glides soothingly over some subject or other of general interest, like the migration patterns of Atlantic salmon or the history of the Thirty Years' War.
But the highlight of the whole thing is the interviews, in which Cunk unabashedly presents the world's best and brightest with the banal concerns of a somewhat self-absorbed everywoman. Sometimes this brings out the best in her subjects, as when Cambridge philosophy professor Douglas Hedley walks patiently with her through a meandering story about"my mate Paul," using her pedestrian concerns as an invitation to theological speculation.
In other cases, though, Cunk's questions are so mind-numbingly basic that they deflate the pretensions of abstruse academic theory. In the series's crowning moment, Philomena quizzes theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili, CBE, about the idea that life is just a computer simulation."If this is a simulation, why is the computer making me ask you this?" demands Cunk.
Faced with these simple questions, simulation theory dissolves into meaningless incoherence. Al-Khalili isn't trying to defend the theory, just to explain it — but he seems genuinely flummoxed by the fundamental issues Cunk raises. When a Commander of the Order of the British Empire can't answer first-order questions in plain terms about a theory that concerns every living human, people are entitled to question the use — or indeed the sanity — of such obscure speculations.
Academics, that much-maligned class of seekers after hidden knowledge, have come under considerable fire of late. Much of it has hit the mark. But nothing is more disarming or more devastating than to ask a learned philosopher how his grand ideas might sound to a small child or a slightly dimwitted member of the general public.
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