Benedict Cumberbatch by Justin Lewis

the game to reach safety by navigating via sound cues alone. Then in 2012, he became a recording artist of sorts: he performed asix-minute long spoken word piece for a compilation album assembled by the band Friendly Fires. Part of the
Late Night Tales
series, it was a stew of styles which had influenced the group, from indie heroes like Stereolab and the Cocteau Twins to the more surprising inclusion of Olivia Newton-John . His track was a reading of ‘Flat of Angels’ by Simon Cleary. Cumberbatch was a fan of Friendly Fires, and the feeling was mutual. ‘He really got into subtleties in the text I didn’t realise were there,’ said Cleary. The piece was about the comedown of a house party, delivered in alternating voices. In 2013, he would contribute a second section of the tale to another
Late Night Tales
mix album, this time by the Norwegian electronic music duo Röyksopp.
    * * *
    But through all of this, Benedict Cumberbatch always stayed loyal to radio, whether drama on BBC Radio 3 and the World Service channel (the latter heard worldwide), or material for Radio 4 and its sister speech station, BBC Radio 7 (later, BBC Radio 4 Extra). In January 2013, just as the fourth series of
Cabin Pressure
was being broadcast, it was announced that he would feature in a new adaptation (by radio producer Dirk Maggs) of Neil Gaiman’s
Neverwhere
, a cult fantasy set in an alternative subterranean version of London. It was a London where fictional characters would live alongside real historical figures and peculiarly apt that Cumberbatch was cast for this. Here is a man who has spent roughly half his professional career portraying real people,and half playing created characters – even though some of those fictional figures are so vivid and enduring, it’s tempting to imagine them as real. This time he met yet another of his idols on the project, Sir Christopher Lee.
    ‘It was extraordinary to talk to that man. I’m very new to all this so I’m still tongue-tied when I meet my heroes.’
    Cumberbatch, then, loves working in the medium of sound only. Even though it generally pays less than film, television and stage, the advantages – as with all voice work – are that it is relatively quick to do, and there are no long and expensive location shoots. With a talented director and an able cast, a radio drama can be recorded in a day in a studio with artful effects and sound design. ‘It’s nice to intensely concentrate on and listen to the word,’ he told the
Radio Times
. ‘Radio’s just a joy.’

CHAPTER 8
FROM SUPPORT TO LEAD
    I t was 2006, and Benedict Cumberbatch was approaching his thirtieth birthday. Over the next few years, he would tackle more and more ambitious roles, some minor, some major. He was becoming one of the most versatile actors in British drama, able to switch between the different demands of stage, film and TV with a seeming effortlessness. Over the next three or four years, his diary would be crammed with commitments. His film work would include some of the most acclaimed British features of the period, as well as some diverting work on lower-budget productions. On the London stage, he would excel in some interesting revivals. And on television, he would flourish in both drama and comedy.
    In 2005, Benedict Cumberbatch had been one of nearly 150 actors hired for
Broken News
, a new sketch show for BBC2, which parodied television news and current affairs output. Inthe 1990s, Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris’s
The Day Today
had been a groundbreaking and pitch-perfect distortion of slick, aggressive magazine shows and bulletins like
Newsnight
. But
Broken News
’s creators, John Morton and Tony Roche, wanted to reflect the 24-hour news channels of the twenty-first century, which had to stretch material in order to fill space, and so made great play of switching between channels in the middle of items, as if the show were being controlled by a bored, jaded viewer. ‘It reflects how we’ve become