Benedict cumberbatch

Benedict Cumberbatch should take a vow of humility, not silence

Should celebrities really shut up about politics? Nick Timothy makes a persuasive argument on ConservativeHome that Benedict Cumberbatch et al should stop lecturing theatregoers and pontificating about Edward Snowden because they lower the standard of political debate in this country. He writes: ‘So if I had a wish for 2016, it would be that these pompous, hypocritical, self-obsessed political celebrities would take a vow of silence. If that proves impossible, surely it is time for our politicians and the media to stop humouring these vain and ignorant liberal luvvies. Doing so would be good not just for my sanity but the standard of political debate in this country – which

Benedict Cumberbatch defends his ‘f— the politicians’ rant

After Benedict Cumberbatch indulged in a foul-mouthed rant about the government’s response to the refugee crisis, he was criticised by several figures — including Boris Johnson — for using the theatre as a platform for his political views. In fact, the incident even left Mr S asking: is Benedict Cumberbatch the new Russell Brand? Judging by comments he made today after collecting his CBE, the actor could well succeed the retired-revolutionary. When reporters outside the palace put to the Sherlock actor that he may regret his comments — which included the line ‘f— the politicians’, Cumberbatch said actually it was quite the contrary: ‘Have you been to the theatre recently? How many times? Have you

Why should we listen to Benedict Cumberbatch on Syrian refugees?

Because I just don’t know what to think about the Syrian refugee crisis — not even after Simon Schama’s powerfully cogent argument on Question Time the other week, where he explained that if you don’t want to house them all in your guest bedroom you’re basically a Nazi — I thought I might pay the scalps a couple of hundred quid or so to see Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet at the Barbican. Apparently the really exciting bit isn’t anything he does as the Dane but rather Shakespeare’s rarely performed postscript where Hamlet comes back to life in the terrifying form of a preening, hectoring Old Harrovian luvvie to berate the

Is Benedict Cumberbatch the new Russell Brand?

With Russell Brand no longer an active revolutionary, having officially retired from politics after failing to make an impact on the general election, there’s a vacancy for a new celebrity champion of fashionable political causes. Thankfully Benedict Cumberbatch appears to be doing his best to fit the bill. The Sherlock actor made the news last week after he ranted on-stage about the government’s response to the refugee crisis following a performance of Hamlet at the Barbican. According to the Daily Mail, Cumberbatch let it be known that he thought the government’s pledge to take 20,000 refugees was not enough, before — eloquently — concluding: ‘f— the politicians’. As Boris Johnson points out in the Telegraph, Cumberbatch appeared to be

Podcast: Angela Merkel’s mistake on refugees — and is Tom Watson Labour’s saviour?

Angela Merkel’s offer to welcome any Syrian refugees who reach Germany will have far reaching, potential devastating consequences. On this week’s View from 22 podcast, James Forsyth debates this week’s Spectator cover feature on Merkel’s grandstanding with Holly Baxter from the Independent. Has David Cameron done the right thing by not offering asylum to more refugees? Are all European countries pulling equal weight in dealing with the crisis? And what will the European Union as a whole do next to help the refugees? Dan Hodges and former Labour adviser John McTernan also discuss whether Tom Watson could be the man who holds the Labour party together. The former Brownite bruiser has made plenty of enemies in the party, but he is expected to be elected Deputy Leader on Saturday,

Lloyd Evans

Nice work

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/merkelstragicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”Kate Maltby and Igor Toronyi-Lalic discuss Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet” startat=1642] Listen [/audioplayer]You can’t play the part of Hamlet, only parts of Hamlet. And the bits Benedict Cumberbatch offers us are of the highest calibre. He delivers the soliloquies with a meticulous and absorbing clarity like a lawyer in the robing room mastering a brief before his summing-up. And though he’s a decade too old to play the prince (the grave scene sets his age at about 28), he cavorts about the stage like a ballet dancer delighting in his own athleticism. But he’s also much too nice. The darkest shades of melancholy and the raw emotional ugliness are

Salvation through music

Ours is the era of everybody’s autobiography. Bookshops groan with misery-lit memoirs — Never Let Me Go, Dysfunction Without Tears — which dilate on anorexia, alcoholism, cruel bereavement. When is a life worth telling? B.S. Johnson, the London-born novelist (and tireless chronicler of himself), put the most revealing sexual details into his autobiographical novels of the 1960s. They might have amounted to mere solipsistic spouting, were the writing not so good. James Rhodes, a 40-year-old classical musician, was repeatedly raped at his London prep school in the early 1980s. In his memoir, Instrumental, Rhodes tells how he found salvation in music and became one of our leading concert pianists. Written

Jonathan Aitken says farewell to Alan Rusbridger

Sore heads over at the Guardian this morning after yet another leaving party for Alan Rusbridger. In what Mr S makes to be Rusbridger’s third leaving do, politicians and celebrities gathered at the Battlebridge Room of Kings Place to raise a glass to the departed editor. Ed Miliband chatted away to Benedict Cumberbatch over a bottle of Sol, while Chuka Umunna and Harriet Harman tucked into the prosecco. No sign of any of the Labour leadership contenders, but a smattering of Tories were in attendance, including Lord Grade and David Davis. Perhaps the most surprising appearance was from Jonathan Aitken – after all, it was Rusbridger’s dogged pursuit of the disgraced former Tory MP

Liberty’s ‘Human Rights’ campaign uses luvvies to spread misinformation

Does anybody else remember life in Britain before the year 2000?  Despite the distressing increase in the number of walking, talking human beings one meets who were born since the millennium, there must be some other people who remember those times.  Yet what a picture of that era is now being painted. Take the incredibly glitzy and celeb-driven campaign currently running thanks to the campaign group ‘Liberty’.  No less a site than The Spectator has run the ads. And understandably so. For they are not only well-funded but feature the icons of our time.  Each video consists of a star like Benedict Cumberbatch, Simon Callow or Vanessa Redgrave reading out

The Heckler: down with the actor-commentariat!

I’ve never been terribly keen on actors. I prefer hairdressers and accountants. And teachers and builders and lawyers. I may even prefer politicians and footballers to actors. It’s a modesty thing. No profession demands more attention. And no attention is less warranted. Everywhere you look, there they are pouting and grimacing on billboards and TV screens, like oversized teenagers. How have we come to this? These people dress up and pretend to be other people — for a living! It wouldn’t be quite so bad if that were all they did. But these days actors are taking over our public space in a way that is unsettling and impossible to

Benedict Cumberbatch reads at his distant relation Richard III’s burial (despite saying he’s not ‘part of the landed gentry’)

Benedict Cumberbatch once complained that ‘posh-bashing’ had got so bad in Britain that he was contemplating a move to America. Cumberbatch, who attended Harrow, moaned that people showed prejudice towards his background despite the fact that he is not actually that posh. ‘I wasn’t really born with a silver spoon in my mouth, or as part of the landed gentry,’ the Sherlock actor lamented. However, next time the topic comes up Cumberbatch may wish to hold his tongue, as it turns out that the actor may be a lot closer to being a member of the ‘landed gentry’ than he first thought. According to Kevin Schurer, a genealogist at the University of Leicester, Cumberbatch is the second cousin 16

Kate Maltby

Today’s reburial wasn’t about Richard III. It was about Benedict Cumberbatch

We should have known it. Today’s reburial isn’t about Richard III. It’s about Benedict Cumberbatch. Isn’t everything these days, somehow about Benedict Cumberbatch? I have a theory that he’s the one who really punched Oisin Tymon, and poor Clarkson is just taking the rap. Jeremy Clarkson, Richard III, both cruelly maligned blokes. They’ll be banning nepoticide at the BBC next. But back to The Batch. An hour ago, Cumberbatch popped up as the star attraction at the Richard III’s reinternment at Leicester Cathedral, to read a poem newly written for the service by poet laureate Carol Anne Duffy. This whole affair is beginning to feel uncomfortably like a Narnia reenactment

Mark Gatiss: I based Sherlock’s Mycroft on Peter Mandelson

In the BBC’s Sherlock, Mark Gatiss plays Sherlock Holmes’s sly older brother Mycroft. Now the actor has revealed in an interview with the Radio Times that the person who inspired his performance is none other than Peter Mandelson. ‘I based Mycroft on Peter Mandelson. It was explicit even before I was going to play him. Steven Moffat and I talked about how Mandelsonian Mycroft was… Conan Doyle says Mycroft is the British government. He’s the power behind the throne. Both Mandelson and Mycroft are the sort of people who, I think, would sit out a world war. [They would think] there’s a longer game to be played.’ Happily, this meant Gatiss didn’t need to stretch himself too

Eton vs Harrow: Eddie Redmayne comes out on top at the Baftas

Much has been made of Eddie Redmayne’s education at Eton after Chris Bryant claimed that British culture should not be dominated by public schoolboys like The Theory of Everything actor. Mr Steerpike hopes that the Labour MP gave tonight’s Baftas a miss for his own sake, as alumni from Britain’s two most prestigious private schools battled it out in the Best Actor category. Redmayne was pitted against Benedict Cumberbatch, who attended Harrow. Alas Cumberbatch’s efforts as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game were not enough to clinch him victory. It was the 33-year-old Old Etonian who came up trumps, taking home the Best Actor award for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Hawking was

Jude Law tutors Douglas Booth on the perils of being too good looking

With the Baftas taking place on Sunday, spare a thought for those thespians known for their good looks and not their acting ability. According to Douglas Booth, it’s a real problem. Things have got so bad for the dashing Riot Club actor that he recently sought out advice from Jude Law on how to stop his handsome appearance getting in the way of his career. ‘Jude said, “Don’t worry, they will be obsessed with it for a minute then they will forget about it”,’ Booth says in an interview with the Evening Standard. ‘Not that I’m comparing myself to them but Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp – all of these people

Benedict Cumberbatch: Pardon all gay men convicted under same law as Alan Turing

A screening of The Imitation Game hosted by the American ambassador Matthew Barzun saw Alan Turing’s nephew Sir John Dermot Turing and his great-niece Rachel Barnes welcomed to 24 Grosvenor Square. There Barzun spoke of the progress that both America and Britain have made with gay rights since Turing’s day. The wartime code-breaker committed suicide after he was found guilty of gross indecency and given chemical castration treatment as punishment. He was given a pardon for his ‘crime’ by the Queen in 2013. Now, members of the film’s cast have signed an open letter to the British government urging them to to pardon the estimated 49,000 men who were persecuted under the same law that Alan Turing was found guilty of. Mr S suspects

What Benedict Cumberbatch didn’t understand about ‘coloured’Photo: Getty

Benedict Cumberbatch apologised at length: ‘devastated’, ‘shaming’, ‘offended’, ‘inappropriate’. What had he done? Been caught in a compromising situation or stolen from a shop? No he had used the word coloured with reference to black people. It is the strongest current form of taboo, worse than defecating in public, though I admit that this would have quite an effect on an American chat show. It was in America that poor Mr Cumberbatch, the flawless actor, delivered the criminal word. It was so unfair. He had been arguing that black people get a raw deal in acting. He wouldn’t dream of using nigger — so taboo in America, and in many

Political correctness: How censorship defeats itself

A cretin writing in this morning’s Telegraph doesn’t understand the meaning of ‘cretin’. Just about every writer writing about Benedict Cumberbatch in every paper yesterday failed to understand that Cumberbatch was not a racist because he had said ‘coloured’ rather than ‘person of colour’. Poor fool that he was, Cumberbatch had wanted to use his appearance on US television to complain about the lack of opportunities for black actors in Britain: ‘I think as far as coloured actors go, it gets really different in the UK, and a lot of my friends have had more opportunities here than in the UK, and that’s something that needs to change.’ After the battering

My four great loves were unrequited (though I had a chance with Ginger Rogers)

I had a short chat with BBC radio concerning the actor Jack Nicholson, whom I knew slightly during the Seventies and Eighties. Alas, it had to do with age, his and mine, 77 and 78 respectively. No, the man on the other end of the telephone did not ask me anything embarrassing. All he wanted to know was if women still come on to an oldie, or are they, as Jack Nicholson claims, a thing of the past. Well, for starters I do not believe that Nicholson is telling the truth, that he’s now alone and fears he will die alone because women have abandoned a sinking ship. He has

Why is Stephen Fry’s decision to get married a major news story for the BBC?

Why, do you reckon, was Stephen Fry’s decision to marry another man an item in a BBC radio news bulletin earlier today, right up there with the row over Jim Murphy and the mansion tax? I mean, we’re obviously interested – personally I was completely riveted by the revelation he’s all of 30 years older than his partner – but not as in national interest? I mean it’s one for the papers, in the light celeb stories slot, but not the news… surely? Even those who accept that gay and heterosexual marriages are on a par – which I don’t – must question whether Mr Fry’s status as Twitter king and Well-Known Gay