by Justin Lewis
Rob James-Collier, Thomas the footman in Downton Abbey, would reignite the ongoing debate about class in the acting profession. The Stockport-born actor told the Radio Times in March 2012 that he had no ‘posh’ leanings and said that getting a professional foothold in acting was hard without money behind you. ‘You have to work for a year with no money. How on earth are you going to finance that?’ It was not unlike the internships of other professions that, if unpaid, would be only available to those from wealthy families. Prior to landing a part in Coronation Street, James-Collier had supported himself in the hunt for acting jobs by working in factories and as a labourer. ‘Because you’ve done the horrible jobs it gives you an even grittier determination to succeed. If I had a comfort blanket, I wouldn’t have been as passionate and driven. When you get there, you really do appreciate it because you know where you’ve been.’
Louise Brealey, who as pathologist Molly Hooper appeared alongside Cumberbatch in Sherlock, still juggled acting with journalism and TV producing. In arts and media, she argued, those from affluent backgrounds were at an advantage. ‘It’s getting more difficult all the time for kids from poorer backgrounds to break in, because you’re expected to work for nothing in endless internships. Without someone bankrolling you, that’s impossible. The upshot is that working-class voices will be heard even less frequently than they are already.’
It did seem as if, bar the soaps such as Emmerdale, Coronation Street and EastEnders, popular blue-collar dramas had faded from most peak-time TV. The Radio Times’ Gareth McLean wondered if there could ever be modern-day reflections of working-class Britain like Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Clocking Off or Boys from the Blackstuff. ‘Where are those shows now?’ McLean wrote. ‘The only time you see working-class life on TV is when they go back to people’s houses on The X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent.’
But Cumberbatch dismissed claims that there was any kind of ‘private school elite’ in acting. He described himself as ‘definitely middle-class’. ‘People have tried to pull together a pattern,’ he told the Mail on Sunday in May 2013, ‘because Tom Hiddleston, Eddie Redmayne, Damian Lewis and I were all privately educated. But James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Tom Hardy weren’t, and they’re equally talented. It’s just lazy.’
It’s considered bad form to complain if you’re both famous and wealthy, and if you weren’t poor to start with, that’s even worse. Cumberbatch felt he couldn’t win, when it came to discussing his origins: ‘You either come across as being arrogant and ungrateful if you complain about it, or being snooty and overprivileged if you bathe in it.’
On the face of it, a five-part television drama series called Parade’s End did little to alter the perception of Cumberbatch as one of the screen’s top portrayers of the upper-middle class and above. It was set in Edwardian England around the time of the outbreak of the First World War, and he played a government statistician called Christopher Tietjens, with Rebecca Hall co-starring as his socialite wife Sylvia. As Sylvia begins an extra-marital affair, he falls for a free-spirited suffragette called Valentine Wannop, played by the Australian Adelaide Clemens. Based on material from a set of four novels written by Ford Madox Ford in the 1920s, it was adapted by Sir Tom Stoppard, his first contribution to television drama in nearly 30 years.
Cumberbatch felt a special kind of connection towards Christopher Tietjens, a physically cumbersome and emotionally undemonstrative Yorkshireman whose quiet loyalty, intelligence and patriotism he found truly heroic and inspirational. ‘He’s not just another toff in a period drama,’ he said. ‘I have such a huge affection for Christopher – more so than almost any other character I’ve played. I sympathise with his care, his sense of duty and virtue, his intelligence in the face of hypocritical, self-serving mediocrity and his love for his country. That is what leads me to love this fat, baggy bolster of a blockhead.’
He later said that he had based his visual interpretation of the character (as a ‘very intelligent but rather oafish buffoon’) on Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, who had a habit of making gaffes during speeches, a trait that endeared him to some, but not to others. To fill out for the part, he needed to put on a fair bit of weight. ‘There was a lot of rubbish food and drinking alcohol without worrying about it… lots of beer, wine, chips, the most amazing proper steaks and goulashes.’
But he was advised not to over-egg the Borisisms. ‘They stopped me going the whole hog because they wanted a pin-up. He’s got to be seen as sexually attractive, or why would someone as beautiful as Valentine fall for him?’ The onscreen chemistry between her and Christopher would indeed be intense. ‘He is so inspiring and overwhelming in the best possible way,’ Adelaide Clemens gushed of her co-star. ‘We were feeding each other’s curiosity. He is so in control of his craft.’
Though he shared the icy-cold wit of Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, Tietjens was a much more considered and stately thinker, someone who doesn’t reach rapid conclusions, but who seems to already possess inbuilt wisdom. Although the man originated in a quartet of novels relatively few had read, the obscurity of the character was advantageous for Cumberbatch. He saw the role as a blank canvas, and an opportunity to make the part his own. He had also vowed to avoid upper-class British characters for a time, feeling that he was in danger of being typecast, and being too associated with such figures. But Tietjens was too much of a temptation to turn down. He accepted the challenge.
Parade’s End had been adapted for television once before – as one of the earliest dramas made for the BBC’s second TV channel, BBC2. It aired in December 1964, with Ronald Hines as Tietjens, and a young Judi Dench as Valentine. BBC Radio 3 had mounted a production in 2003, with Tom Goodman-Hill as Tietjens. The plans for the new version were officially announced in September 2011, around a year before broadcast. Comparisons were immediately drawn between it and the ITV series Downton Abbey – which had launched in 2010, and had become one of the network’s biggest drama hits in years. On the face of it, the two series did indeed share certain similarities. Both were set around the same time – namely the period before and during the First World War – and both dealt with social tensions surrounding the English aristocracy.
Parade’s End’s producers insisted any similarities were superficial and coincidental, especially as the concept for the series had been hatched some time before Downton Abbey had reached the screen.
‘I can honestly say,’ said executive producer Damien Timmer, ‘that we started off doing this before any of us had ever heard about Downton Abbey.’ ‘Just because things are set in a similar period,’ argued Ben Stephenson, drama head at the BBC, where a TV version of Sebastian Faulks’ WWI novel Birdsong was also in the pipeline, ‘doesn’t mean that they are the same.’
Sir Tom Stoppard had finished writing his adaptation of Parade’s End in 2009, a year before Downton Abbey launched. Stoppard was in no doubt as to why the Edwardian period was so fascinating for millions of viewers a century later. ‘It was the last period of social history among the top half of the English class system. In the case of 1914 [the outbreak of World War I], there is a sense of an important page being turned, never to be turned back again.’ Parade’s End contained many themes like post-war trauma, shell-shock and remembrance of lives lost that would remain relevant in the twenty-first century.
Ford Madox Ford, the author of the original novels, had himself served in World War I. Born in 1873 in Surrey as Ford Hermann Hueffer, he had a German father, but changed his name just after World War I as he felt it sounded too German. The four novels he wrote between 1924 and 1928 and covering the period 1912 to the early 1920s, and later favourites of Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene, did not lend themselves easily to visual adaptation. They were modernist, bordering on experimental, and many of the themes and treatments would be hard to transfer directly. ‘You have the problem that there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in the novel,’ Tom Stoppard added, ‘without necessarily having the dramatic momentum or even the physical co
ncrete dimension to it.’ Stoppard confessed to being a little out of date on the matter of writing for television. He hadn’t written anything for the medium since the BBC’s Squaring the Circle in 1984 – ‘I write talkies. I wrote Parade’s End in the same spirit as I write stage plays.’
The main reason for the delay in bringing Parade’s End to life as a television series was mostly a financial one. With a star-studded cast including Anne-Marie Duff, Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett, as well as old friends and colleagues of Cumberbatch’s such as Roger Allam, Rebecca Hall and Patrick Kennedy, the sheer cost of the lavish project required international backing. There were over 100 speaking parts, and nearly 150 different locations (from Yorkshire to Belgium), a vast number for a five-part television series. Eventually, HBO, the American cable network, and home to The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire and Curb Your Enthusiasm, agreed to co-fund with the BBC. The total bill for the series was around £12 million, the most expensive drama series yet made for BBC2.
Cumberbatch was formally offered the part of Tietjens in early 2011, and filming began in the late summer of that year. One location shoot took place in Belgium, at Ypres, site of some of the most intense battles of the First World War. ‘When I got into the trench, with one of those tin hats on,’ Cumberbatch recalled, ‘I realised you’re standing basically in a grave. Everything above you is exploding and anything over the edge is death. With the tin trench helmet on, you hardly see any sky. The practicality of just moving around was hard enough and you’re supposed to be a fighting machine. Going up a ladder knowing you are walking into gunfire goes against every instinct of what it is to be a human being.’
‘You never quite get used to imagining how it must have been for men my age, 100 years ago,’ he added. ‘It’s a duty as an actor to respect their memory in a way, and you do feel an almost patriotic pressure to get it true and right.’
He narrowly escaped injury during the Belgium shoot. During the making of a dream sequence which involved an explosion, it went off in his face – ‘It was terrifying. I was engulfed in flames.’ Fortunately, he suffered no damage apart from his hair, eyebrows and eyelashes being singed, and none of this damage would be permanent.
From a twenty-first century perspective, of course, the events of World War I still had resonance for many, many people. ‘We’re living through a time where we are fighting wars with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘We are living in times of political hypocrisy, and there aren’t that many really good people. And Christopher is just that – a good man.’
The relevance of Parade’s End in 2012 didn’t stop at war either. ‘People are asking questions about how we behave as a society,’ commented director Susanna White, ‘the environment, money, politicians and the NHS, and that’s all in Parade’s End. It’s asking big questions about society and how we behave. Even the love triangle asks what happens if you marry the wrong person. I think there is a lot which will still chime with people.’
Parade’s End would be broadcast on BBC2 in late August and September 2012. In the week before broadcast, Benedict Cumberbatch would become headline news because of a handful of remarks he made in interviews to promote the show. Invited to comment on the notion that his new series could be classed as ‘a thinking person’s Downton Abbey’, he dismissed any comparisons as ‘crude’ and ‘a danger’, but later (while naming no names) promised that the five-parter would not be ‘some crappy, easily digestible milk-chocolate on a Sunday evening… It’s going to be hard work, but it will pay dividends if you stick with it.’
So was that a veiled criticism of Downton Abbey, already a hit on Sunday nights? One couldn’t be sure, although Cumberbatch then celebrated his new series as ‘funny, pointed, but also three-dimensional. We’re not serving purposes to make some clichéd comment about “Oh, isn’t it awful the way there’s this upstairs-downstairs divide.” It’s a little bit more sophisticated.’
It was a slow news week. Parliament was in recess for the summer. The London 2012 Olympics had just finished, and the Paralympics were yet to take place. And Cumberbatch was now a star in a way he hadn’t been even two years before, so anything he said would be instantly quotable. The press picked up his remarks and ran with them, engaging in much comment and debate. Was this deliberate provocation, to have a dig at the competition, or simply to send up the question put to him?
Yet if he did mean Downton Abbey on that occasion, he wasn’t alone in making the comparison. ‘I think we’ve got to signal to people that they’re not going to turn on and get something cosy like Downton Abbey,’ said Susanna White. ‘It’s television that makes demands on you – if you go away to make a cup of tea, you’ll be lost.’
It may have required concentration, but plenty of viewers were prepared to sit tight and pay close attention. Parade’s End premiered on Friday nights, traditionally an evening for entertainment rather than drama, but over 3 million viewers saw the first episode, immediately making it BBC2’s highest rated drama series since Rome (another HBO co-production) in 2005. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the collection of the original books became a bestseller, zooming into the Amazon top 10 chart. And the presence of Benedict Cumberbatch was undoubtedly a key factor in the success of the series, with his brooding silences wowing the critics. ‘There’s something of the Alan Rickman about him,’ said the Guardian. ‘One drowsy droop of an eyelid, one slip of the planes of his face, can convey either wry honest amusement or withering contempt.’
It was generally agreed that any comparison between Parade’s End and Downton Abbey held little water, and the fuss died down, only to flare up again – more directly this time – only a few weeks later. In an interview with Reader’s Digest magazine, Cumberbatch believed that the second series of Downton Abbey was inferior to the first, and had ‘traded a lot on the sentiment’. He was quoted as branding it as ‘fucking atrocious’.
Inevitably, the showbiz desks of newspapers – both tabloid and broadsheet – rang round to find if anyone connected with Downton Abbey would give a right of reply. Series creator Julian Fellowes stepped into the fray, fully aware of what the phrase ‘good copy’ meant: ‘I have known Ben since he was a little boy and I couldn’t be fonder of him. I am quite sure what he said has been taken out of context and does not at all reflect his real feelings. [It’s] all part of a surge of interest in television drama, which can only be good news for all of us.’
Cumberbatch confirmed what he had said had been a private joke. ‘Anyone who knows me, including my friends Julian Fellowes and Hugh Bonneville, just laughed when they read it.’ He went on to say that in his opinion the second run of Downton Abbey lacked the sharpness of the first series, ‘but what Julian does is great – it’s good Sunday night telly.’ In a subsequent interview, he would groan about the perceived slagging. ‘I’ve got family and friends in it. My dad was in the Christmas special, for God’s sake.’
Even beyond this, other Cumberbatch soundbites seeped into the mass media. At around the same time, he had told the Radio Times that he was tired of being ‘castigated as a moaning, rich, public school bastard’, followed by: ‘It’s all so predictable, so domestic, so dumb. It makes me think I want to go to America. I wasn’t born into land or titles, or new money, or an oil rig.’ The A-word of ‘America’ sounded an alarm bell of the notion that he’d decamp to the States at any moment as he would get away from posh roles there.
It was an over-reaction, delivered with his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek. Besides, he had been asked about America before, back in 2007. He had been seduced by the glamour of it: ‘It was the red carpet treatment all the way – limousines, first-class flight – it was dreamy.’ But he didn’t want to relocate, and was irritable about the assumption from the press that he would move to Hollywood at the first possible opportunity. ‘Which is kind of tiresome, but people still think it sells papers.’
Radio Times had become a publication that would customarily hit t
he headlines of a Tuesday morning for its star interview. It would crank up the controversy level of the interviewee, saying something as a joke and to garner attention would send it to the press. So it was with the Cumberbatch interview. The epitome of a storm in a teacup, but in a quiet week for news in the middle of summer, it was a jumping-off point for a subject that never seems to be off the agenda in the UK: the class system.
Reaction in the press was swift, although there was less outrage than wry amusement. Writing in the Independent about his protestations, Viv Groskop (a Cumberbatch fan) wrote that it was faintly ludicrous simply because ‘Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch has a name of exceptionally ridiculous proportions. One so silly no novelist would dare to propose it. The Americans so don’t deserve that name!’ Others pointed out that Harrow’s annual fees (£30,000 in 2012) were only just below the average annual salary for a British male, and that over half the British medallists at the Olympics had been in private education.
Generally cordial, courteous and entertaining in interviews, Benedict Cumberbatch could feel anger about media privacy. Happy to promote and discuss his work, he found the prying into people’s personal lives to be unnecessary and unpleasant. Speaking to National Public Radio in the USA in 2012, he talked of his unease towards the British press: ‘We’re living in an era where there’s an awful lot of soul-searching, with the Leveson Inquiry, and [Rupert] Murdoch being held out to task, and just being exposed for the fraudulent, pathetic, abhorrent behaviour that is rife in all our media.’ Cumberbatch’s difficult experiences with the press about his own life were relatively minor, but even so, for an A-lister to be this outspoken about the tabloids was unusual. It underlined his ambivalence towards national and international fame.
