Benedict Cumberbatch by Justin Lewis Page A

news addicts in this multi-media age,’ said Morton, previously creator of the documentary pastiche
People Like Us
and later writer of
Twenty Twelve
. ‘In
Broken News
, the frenetic world of news isn’t about news anymore. It’s about predictions, speculations, recap, taking a look at tomorrow’s or yesterday’s papers – possibly even last Thursday’s papers.’
    Cumberbatch played a roving reporter on
Broken News
, the hapless Will Parker, whose official job title was worldly affairs correspondent for a fictional network called PVS. ‘Unlucky Will is on the spot in prime locations,’ he explained, ‘but there are usually empty podiums behind him because the people he’s waiting for don’t turn up. So he fills airtime with ridiculous conversations about the person he is expecting to see.’ For instance: ‘Well, the speculation here in Washington has been at least as much to do with what Mr Rumsfeld isn’t going to say as it has been about what he might or might not say, when he arrives any minute now behind me.’
    ‘Will is always first on the scene,’ said Cumberbatch, ‘waiting for a story to break, but he’s so early that he doesn’treally know anything. Basically, he has to fill lots of empty space saying the same idiotic thing in lots of different ways. If you watch any big story unfolding on TV, you’ll realise it’s painfully close to reality.’
    On another assignment, Parker found himself in Greece waiting outside a hospital for an exclusive on the potentially worrying outbreak of tomato flu. As John Morton acknowledged, ‘News has started to borrow the grammar of theatre. It has become a dramatisation, which is strange because drama has been heading in the opposite direction by borrowing the grammar of documentary.’
    Had
Broken News
been made any more recently, Cumberbatch would have been arguably too well-known to have been convincing in the part of Will. Part of the joke with a television satire of form is to be persuaded that the cast are real people, and several other future famous names lurked in the
Broken News
ranks, among them Sharon Horgan (creator and star of the sitcom
Pulling
) and Miranda Hart’s sidekick on
Miranda
, Sarah Hadland. ‘We wanted faces that could sort of slip under your radar,’ explained the producer of the series, Paul Schlesinger, ‘which is why we spent over three months in casting. When you look at the screen, we need you to believe that you really are watching a news network.’
    * * *
    After a shaky start, Cumberbatch’s film work was finally starting to gather pace. By his late twenties, he had featuredin a short film, 2002’s
Hills Like White Elephants
(based on an Ernest Hemingway short story), and as ‘Royalist’ in
To Kill a King
, a drama about Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax, but little else. But in the wake of his success as
Hawking
on TV, the cinematic offers finally began to roll in.
    Though he only had a small role in it,
Starter for 10
was a success. It was a coming-of-age comedy set in 1985 and adapted from a best-selling novel by David Nicholls, who cut his teeth writing for ITV’s
Cold Feet
, and would later pen the even more successful
One Day
. James McAvoy played a Bristol University undergraduate and quiz addict called Brian Jackson, who had a hunger to appear on the inter-college quiz
University Challenge
(a TV fixture since the early 1960s), but whose general knowledge about social and sexual situations was less certain. ‘It’s about a teenager trying to fit into the world,’ said McAvoy. ‘That’s a story that will be told forever.’
    Cumberbatch’s appearance in
Starter for 10
was one of the film’s highlights. He played Patrick, the fiercely ambitious and pedantic captain of Bristol University’s
University Challenge
team. ‘He’s old before his time, and very bad-tempered , all of which are attributes which I’m very much aware of myself, so that was easy to play.’ But he had also drawn inspiration for