Cunk on Earth (2022) s01e05 Episode Script

1
Last time, in 29 informative
yet accessible minutes,
we saw how a string of breakthroughs
led humankind to build the modern world
and create a weapon powerful enough
to turn it all to white-hot, boiling shit.
But that was only part of the story.
The part after that starts now.
It's 1945.
The atomic bomb's just gone off.
The world lies in ruins.
Cloning of Hitler has already begun.
The future looked uncertain,
and it was getting closer every minute,
like it always does.
But this was going to be a future
unlike any the world had seen before.
A future of moon men and rock stars,
big business and free love,
computers and the Internet.
And a killer robot
sent through time to kill Sarah Connor.
Although that bit was just in a film.
Modern civilization had arrived,
but a clash of worldviews
meant that the threat of all-out conflict
was never far away.
Could new forms of mass communication
help us all to get along?
Or totally not do that?
Should there be two social medias,
one for people who are right
and one for people who are wrong?
I know a lot of people I'd put
on the wrong one, like wankers.
So join me now in the last part
of human existence,
as I find out how we got where I am now
and where we'll be tomorrow,
which at the time of filming is Wednesday.
Whenever the future arrives,
it'll happen here,
on a fragile bauble
I've come to know as Earth.
- Okay, cut.
- My hair looks fucking shit.
Russia. A vast land to the east.
It's the first time
we've mentioned it in this series,
but it's been there all along.
At the start of the 20th century,
Russia was a vast empire,
just like
the Marvel Cinematic Universe is today.
The average Russian was a pheasant,
but he dreamt of being a man.
Preferably a wealthy one.
Because while the Russian pheasants
lived in poverty,
the rich lived in St. Petersburg.
The top Russian was called Czar Nicholas,
which is Russian for King Nicholas.
He was allowed to rule the country
like a dictator,
which I've been advised to say
isn't how Russia works today.
A world like this
where the masses toil for pennies
while a tiny elite grow rich
seems so obviously unfair
and unthinkable to us today,
we can scarcely imagine
what it must have been like.
One man who thought it was
ein load of Scheiße
was German thinker Karl Marx.
It's hard to tell, but if you look closely
at this photograph,
you might notice he had a beard.
Marx also had a vision,
which he wrote down in a book
called The Commonest Man in Festo.
Today, it's one of those books
that boffins talk about,
but no one actually reads, like all books.
But back then, it was a hit,
particularly popular
amongst the 18-to-35 anti-capitalist,
revolutionary demographic.
One Russian who read the book was the man
currently starring in this photograph,
Vladimir Ilyich John Lennon.
Lenin imagined a world
with no possessions,
I wonder if you can,
nothing to kill or die for,
a brotherhood of man.
And he chose to bring it about
with a violent uprising.
In 1917, he got his chance.
Thanks to food shortages, people started
rioting for bread, like ducks do.
Lenin and his followers
hacked into the Winter Palace
and uploaded a communist government.
Russia changed its name to USSR,
or sometimes CCC P!
What was the Soviet onion?
I think you're laboring
under a misapprehension
and you probably mean the Soviet Union.
No, it's onion,
I saw it on a bit of paper earlier.
It's probably been misspelt,
or you can't read very well.
But I think that you mean,
in historical terms, the Soviet Union
or the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics.
I don't want to be rude,
but I think you're mansplaining a bit.
Can we stick to the topic
of the Soviet onion, please?
- Okay.
- What exactly was it?
If you don't know, it's okay to say,
I won't judge you.
Well, if you want to talk about
sort of Russian Soviet vegetables, we can.
I mean, it was a deeply agrarian country.
And so there were lots of onions,
lots of potatoes, lots of other things.
- Did they have turnips?
- Think so.
Cheap, easy to grow, hardy,
great in a stew.
So how come you know
so much about vegetables?
Have you got an allotment?
In 1924, Lenin left the band
to concentrate on existing
only in an afterlife he didn't believe in.
Lenin's place was taken by Joseph Stalin,
who presided over a ruthless crackdown
that killed, starved or exiled
millions of people.
Although on the plus side,
he had a friendly moustache.
Communism and capitalism
are natural enemies,
like men and women and cats and dogs.
But Russia and America
had put aside their differences,
thanks to a mutual interest
in winning the Second World War.
The end of WWII led to loads
of celebrations in black and white,
as people put years of conflict
and misery behind them.
But behind
these outdated-looking celebrations,
trouble was brewing.
Now they'd run out of baddies
to blow up or shoot,
East and West
grew suspicious of each other.
It was the beginning
of a whole new conflict:
World War Cold.
The Cold War is quite complicated,
isn't it?
Should we definitely bother
mentioning it in this,
or could we just give it a miss?
It defines most of the second half
of the 20th century,
so you should probably include it.
Oh, right. Okay.
As the Soviet Union expanded,
the animosity between
East and West deepened.
The division was symbolized
by the construction of the Berlin Wall,
a sort of divorce made of bricks.
There was a terrible atmosphere
of mistrust,
like I had with my ex
when I saw he had 28 missed calls
from a contact he'd labelled
"Claudia Tits" on his phone.
He claims she was just a rep
from Fitness First
and that that was her real name.
Well, I'm sorry, Sean, I didn't buy it
then, and I don't buy it now.
I hope your mum's well.
Soon there was so much paranoia
between East and West,
they started spying on each other,
stockpiled nuclear weapons,
and fought a series of proxy wars.
So, Russia and America had proxy wars
where they'd use
other countries to fight with.
Is that a bit like picking a character
to do your fighting with
in Street Fighter II?
Well, I think throughout human history,
there's been a tendency
to try and use other forces,
fighters from other lands
to help do the fighting.
Right. So exactly like
Street Fighter then.
If this was Street Fighter II
and the Americans chose the character Ken,
would the Russians pick Zangief
because he's from the Soviet Union?
Or would they go for someone like Dhalsim?
Obviously he'd be a better choice because
he can dive kick over Ken's fireballs.
Well, I don't know.
You'd have to ask, I think,
President Putin
for the definitive answer on that.
I suppose they'd go for the ones
that had the most chance of beating Ken.
Meanwhile, East and West
were also competing
to be the first to explore the stars.
The rivalry became known as
the space race because that rhymes,
although probably not in Russian.
We don't know what they called it,
and to be honest,
we probably should have
found out before recording this bit.
The first launches were considered
complete disasters at the time,
but we now know
they make for soothing viewing
when cut to light jazz.
Today, a new moon is in the sky,
a 23-inch metal sphere
placed in orbit by a Russian rocket.
Finally, in 1957,
the Russians became
the first to pull off a successful launch.
Why did the Russians
launch spunk into orbit?
Well, first of all,
when you're looking at Russian words,
the name of the world's first satellite
was Sputnik 1, and the Russians
Is that Russian for "spunk"?
No, it's Russian for "traveler."
I suppose spunk in orbit would
just sort of float around in globules
like it does in a bath.
Sorry, shall I change the subject?
Hot on Sputnik's heels
was this Soviet space-dog,
known on earth as Laika,
who blasted into space in November 1957.
What happened to Laika?
I expect they gave her a bone
and a rub on the tummy when she got back.
Well, Laika, unfortunately,
never made it back to Earth
because shortly after launching
she overheated
and she tragically passed away
just a few hours after being launched.
You're fucking joking!
I wish I was. No, this was
She was launched on a flight
that was pretty much one way.
There's a dead dog in space!
So there's a dead dog
somewhere in the back of a frame
of every film shot in space
like Star Wars?
- I wouldn't say
- There are dead dogs in Star Wars!
- Um
- That is unacceptable.
Well, Laika's satellite eventually
burned up in the Earth's atmosphere,
but this was well after she'd passed away.
As I say, it was just a few hours
after launch that she died.
Sorry, can we just have
a minute's silence for Laika?
Okay.
There's a dead dog in space.
Away from the space race,
everyday Russians often had hard lives,
while Americans, in contrast,
appeared to enjoy a life
of carefree luxury and hats.
Was the 1950s real?
Yes, it was certainly real.
Are we sure? Because it looks like
it was made up when you see it.
It's all men in hats
and housewives smiling in kitchens.
Were those people real,
and was all that really happening?
Well, a lot of that
is what you see in advertising.
The '55 Chevrolet is lower,
wider and longer looking.
The most popular drama on 1950s
television was a show called Adverts.
Adverts told the story of a man
or woman who wanted a thing
and then bought it and then was happy,
the first ever example
of a three-act narrative structure.
- Why, that's amazing!
- Right!
Adverts was so influential,
it made viewers at home
want to be the sort of person
who bought things too.
They'd work hard to get money to buy a car
so they could drive to the shops
and buy more things,
which they'd have to pay for by going back
to work, which made them miserable.
So they'd cheer themselves up
by going out and buying more things,
which they'd have to work to pay for.
- Why, that's amazing!
- Right!
The only time
they weren't working or buying
was when they were watching TV.
And it was on these airwaves
that a new kind of culture was born:
popular culture, unlike normal culture,
which was paintings and Beethoven.
This was stuff people actually enjoyed.
For decades, pioneering Black artists
had steadily built on each other's work
to develop an exciting new musical form
for white people to pass off as their own.
Why do people say Elvis Presley
appropriated white music?
They don't say that. What they do say
is that he appropriated Black music.
He was a white man
that sang music of Black origin.
Did he have to apologize on social media?
No, because there was
no social media then.
- Why doesn't Elvis apologize now?
- Because Elvis is dead.
So he's appropriated dead people's
lifestyles now?
What a fucking thief.
Having overcome childhood poverty
and a hip impediment,
Elvis benefited from mass media,
which broadcast him to an audience
of millions, in sanitized form.
Why was it so dangerous
to show Elvis from the waist down?
Was he naked underneath
like a pervert on a Zoom call?
He wasn't naked.
He moved his hips around a lot
in a very sort of sexual manner.
And there was a lot of anxiety
that young women might be
a little bit too turned on by Elvis.
People were prudish back then,
weren't they?
If they saw his penis, they'd probably
have a stroke, wouldn't they?
Probably. I don't think that
would have made it onto the
Oh, God.
That's not a joke.
What's funny about that?
If they saw his penis,
they'd have a stroke.
That's no laughing matter.
We're talking about people's lives here.
Elvis was so dangerously explosive,
he was requisitioned
by the US Army for military use.
And little wonder,
considering what was going on.
Both Russia and America were building up
huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons,
enough to destroy the entire planet
several times over,
in case they missed the first time.
It seemed the planet
was headed for World War III,
and in the early '60s, it teetered up
to the edge of the brink of the precipice
and gazed straight
into an abyss of no return.
Crisis!
The word suddenly springs alive
ominously in the newspapers
across America
In the Cube and Missile Crisis,
which was more dangerous,
the cubes or the missiles?
You're thinking of the Cuban
Missile Crisis, which refers to Cuba,
which is a country off the coast
of the United States near Florida.
Isn't a cube a terrible shape
for a missile?
It'd be more like a brick.
In 1959, there had been
a communist revolution in Cuba.
A man called Fidel Castro rose to power
and immediately made friends with Russia.
Then in 1962, America discovered
the Soviets were going to use Cuba
as a base for nuclear missiles,
and those missiles could make it
to Florida in just 20 minutes,
if the wind was fair
and they could find somewhere to park.
American president
and pin-up John F'ing Kennedy
demanded the Russians remove the missiles,
otherwise, war was inevitable.
Or worse still, possible.
For six days, the world held its breath,
meaning it might die from asphyxiation
before the bombs even went off.
In the end,
Soviet Emperor Nikita Khrushchev
backed down
like a shameful fucking chicken,
and his missiles went home
with their tails between their legs.
Kennedy was victorious.
John F. Kennedy
won the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Why did he shoot himself afterwards?
Well, he didn't.
He negotiated a settlement
to the Cuban Missile Crisis
with the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev.
And then after that, he ended up
being assassinated in Dallas, Texas,
in 1963, unfortunately,
but he didn't fire the bullet.
Right. It's ironic that he was
so concerned about Cuban missiles
when it was a gun in Texas
he should have been worried about.
I bet he was kicking himself
after he was shot.
Having dodged Armageddon,
the world was hungry for change
and a young generation
who wanted to give peace a chance rose up.
Their heroes weren't politicians
but countercultural musicians
whose works defined the era.
The Rolling Stones were huge in the 1960s.
Would it be fair to say
they were the Beatles of their day?
Well, I thought they were contemporary.
So there was always a jostle
between the Stones and the Beatles.
Right, but the Beatles were already
the Elvis of their day.
So there's a spare Beatles.
Can we give that to the Rolling Stones,
even though they're happening
at the same time?
Well, I think people
have their preferences
between the style of the Beatles
and the style of the Stones.
Okay, so which of the
"the Beatles of their day" was best:
Beatles one or Beatles two?
I think Beatles one is the preferred
Or Beatles the first the Beatles.
Next question:
of all the bands of the 1960s,
which ones was the Kinks?
Meanwhile,
the space race was still being run.
NASA had spent billions of dollars
developing a rocket powerful enough
to reach the moon,
but not so powerful
that it would blow up when it got there.
On board were Neil Armstrong, Alan Alda
and another man
who asked to remain anonymous.
On July 20th, 1969,
the whole world was watching on television
to see if the moon would blow up.
And also because
there was nothing else on.
The global audience
must have been genuinely astounded
by the appalling picture quality,
which was terrible even for the time.
I mean, just look at it.
Looks like they've flown to
the Blur dimension to intercept a smudge.
That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
The sound quality was terrible too,
but what he said was,
"That's one small step for man,
one bionic leap for mankind,"
thereby declaring the moon for men.
Which is why, to this day,
women have been denied entry to the moon.
With the moon landings,
man had achieved greatness,
transcending earthly limits
and exploring the heavens themselves.
Assuming any of this actually happened.
A lot of people on the Internet
say the moon landings were faked.
How right are they?
They are completely wrong.
No historian has ever questioned
the reality of Project Apollo
because not one piece
of so-called evidence
that the conspiracy theorists put forward
has ever stood up to peer review scrutiny.
But obviously it is fake because
how could they have landed on the moon
if the moon isn't real?
What makes you think the moon
isn't real, Philomena?
It isn't. I don't know
if you've done your own research,
but my mate Paul sent me
a video that exposes the whole thing.
Can you prove the moon exists?
You can't, can you?
We see it in the sky.
We have sent spacecraft to the moon.
We've brought samples back to Earth.
No. Watch the video. It'll open your eyes.
You probably believe
in nighttime too, don't you?
I experience it, as do billions
of people around the world.
So, yes, I-I believe in nighttime.
I believe that when the earth rotates,
then we have a period of dark
that we call nighttime.
Wake up. It's all in the video.
They just make us think the moon is real
and that night is real,
just to keep us obedient.
Think about it.
Babies haven't been indoctrinated yet,
so they know
there's no such thing as night.
And that's why they wake up screaming.
Let's move on.
The space race was over.
America had won.
And the prize had turned out to be
the worst holiday destination in history,
which they couldn't even warn people about
because TripAdvisor didn't exist.
But there was a consolation prize:
the best holiday snap in history
taken on Apollo 8 and known as Earthrise.
Today, it's too boring
to hold your attention
in a landmark documentary
for more than eight seconds.
But back then,
this photograph made people think.
And not just a small thought like,
"That looks nice," but a big thought.
It made us realize our planet is fragile.
The ecological movement
had always been popular with hippies,
but people ignored them
because of the way they were dressed
and because they were too stoned
to make their point coherently.
But now scientists began
to worry about the state of the planet.
And so no one would
mistake them for hippies,
they wore clean white coats
and glasses to deliver their warnings.
But we ignored them too,
because they looked like nerds.
The problem was progress.
All the modern gadgets
we'd got so hooked on ran on electricity,
which came from power stations,
which burn fossil fuels,
which creates a gas called CO2,
which flies out of chimneys
and stops the sky working properly.
One solution
to all this environmental damage
was to build nuclear power stations,
which don't emit anywhere near
as much harmful material.
Unless they blow up, which never happens.
Until it did in 1986 at Chernobyl.
The radiation from Chernobyl turned
a huge area into a deadly no-go zone.
Even worse than Reigate Town Centre.
The fallout wafted across
thousands of miles
and had one unforeseen side effect:
it made the bricks of the Berlin wall
extremely brittle,
so brittle it began to collapse.
Desperate locals
rushed to the wall's assistance
and tried to make it better
with hammers and fists.
But it was no use.
As the wall died, so did communism.
Capitalism had won,
with financial markets
embracing globalization
to the toe-tapping sound of
Belgian techno anthem "Pump Up the Jam."
Pump up the jam, pump it up ♪
While your feet are stomping ♪
And the jam is pumping ♪
Look ahead, the crowd is jumping ♪
Pump it up a little more ♪
Get the party going
On the dance floor ♪
See, 'cause that's
Where the party's at ♪
And you'll find out if you do that ♪
I want a place to stay ♪
Get your booty
On the floor tonight ♪
Make my day, I want ♪
Suddenly everybody, apart from
poor people, was making so much money
that there wasn't room
to store it all in coins.
Instead, it had to be stored
in numbers on a screen,
surrounded by men
shouting at it to keep it inside.
To keep track of all this money, the world
needed a special kind of mega abacus,
and luckily it had one: the computer.
Today, computers are everywhere,
but they used to be a cumbersome rarity.
In the '50s and '60s,
one computer would take up a whole room.
But in the 1970s,
engineers made a startling discovery.
If they got rid of all those pointless
flashing lights and spinning tape reels,
they could make computers much smaller.
Small enough, in fact,
to fit on the tip of your finger.
This was the microchip,
and it was amazing.
Thank you.
Give you the little fella back now.
The microchip
couldn't actually do anything
until you shoved it
into a big machine like this.
But in terms of floor space alone,
it was still a big improvement.
Now computers were small enough
to share a house with,
loads more people wanted one.
Silicon Valley was born,
a computer heartland that would be defined
by the rivalry between two men:
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Their names might have been boring,
but the things they said were more boring.
Gates founded Microsoft
and hit the big time with the baffling,
unofficial sequel to Ms. Pac-Man
called MS-DOS.
Meanwhile, Jobs
created the Apple Macintosh,
the world's first
inherently smug computer.
While their rival systems
kept computer users apart,
something else was trying
to bring them all together.
WWW, the web wide world.
The Internet was so modern
and interesting,
it seemed humankind
might never get up from its desk again.
Then, in a dramatic and momentous
keynote presentation,
Steve Jobs revealed he'd discovered
how to put the Internet
inside a portable rectangle,
changing history forever.
And we are calling it iPhone.
Its success inspired tons of imitators,
like that one your mum uses.
And soon, smartphones were so ubiquitous,
you're probably looking at one now
instead of me while I'm saying this.
Smartphones revolutionized
the way humans interact
by providing a socially acceptable way
to ignore everyone around us.
But we're not lonely.
Thanks to social media,
it's quicker and easier than ever
to bond with millions of others
over something as simple as a cat photo
or the ritual shaming of a stranger.
It's easy to see why
the smartphone has become
the most popular invention this century.
It's incredibly advanced,
yet at the same time,
so simple a child can make one.
In fact, not just one
but about 50 of these an hour,
if it wants to avoid another night
in the punishment block.
Sadly, Steve Jobs died
before he could witness Apple's success,
apart from
the first few hundred billion dollars.
On his deathbed,
he made Apple engineers promise
to change the iPhone's headphone jack
every three years,
then uploaded himself to the cloud.
Meanwhile, Gates wasted his fortune
eradicating malaria in the Third World.
But despite Apple
and Microsoft's total failure,
computers continue to go
from strength to strength.
Some believe we're heading
for an event known as the singularity,
where artificial intelligence
becomes too clever for our own good.
While others believe this already happened
and that all of human civilization
exists only inside a computer simulation.
How do we know we're not in a simulation?
We don't know.
There are lots of smart people
who think it is possible
that we live in a simulation.
If this is a simulation,
why is the computer
making me ask you this?
Well from my perspective,
you are asking a question,
so I could imagine that you are
being controlled by a computer,
but you may well feel
that you have free will
and you're asking
those questions yourself.
Why do I have to actually
come and film this?
Couldn't a computer just show it
on the telly in the simulation,
or is that where I am?
Do I exist at all? Why is this happening?
Why isn't it just me
eating a chocolate eclair in a loop?
Like in a GIF. I'd swap for that.
Actually, are people
in looping GIFs caught in a simulation?
Is that what's happened to them?
Where do wasps fit into the simulation?
I'm not quite sure how
Sorry, there's a lot
to unpick, isn't there?
In this series, we've taken you
from our primitive beginnings
through spiritual awakenings,
cultural explosions
and major scientific breakthroughs.
Now, in the present moment,
humankind sits impaled on a crossroads,
facing an uncertain future.
Will we rise to the challenge
of climate change?
Or the opposite of that?
Will computers learn to delete us?
And if they do, how will we get ourselves
out of the recycle bin?
Can humankind learn to exist
at peace with itself?
Or are all of us right now
living through the final hours,
minutes and seconds of civilization?
Or not, I don't know.
And nor do you.
But whatever happens,
it'll happen right here on Earth.
Okay, that was great, we've got that.
- Yeah?
- Yeah, all done. Thank you.
- Is that it?
- Yeah. That's it. Nice one.
- So we're done?
- Yeah, great work.
Oh, great. Are you sure you can make it
look like I've been to these places?
- Yeah. Don't worry about that.
- Really?
We do it on the computers afterwards.
It's amazing these days.
Brilliant, see you then. Bye!
Cut there, guys. Thank you, well done!
That was pretty good I think.
Great. Thank you.