"My Name's Benedict Cumberbatch, and I'm Going to Take You Back in Time"

“BC is doing a documentary on Thursday night @ 8” was the text from HAN on Monday.

A whole hour of Benedict Cumberbatch!!! What more could anyone want??  Well, maybe to have heard of the playwright he was doing the documentary on, I guess. But, I just regarded it as an educational experience and reminded myself that it wasn’t BenMaBeb’s fault that I am seriously uncultured when it comes to the theatre.  

Just to fill in the gaps for anyone who didn’t watch it, our Mr Benedict Cumberbatch presented a documentary on BBC4 on Sir Terence Rattigan, entitled ‘The Rattigan Enigma by Benedict Cumberbatch’, available to watch on iPlayer atm. And honestly, from the moment he opened his mouth and said the words, “My name’s Benedict Cumberbatch, and I’m going to take you back in time”, I couldn’t stop watching it. Or, more precisely, listening. To his voice. Because it. Is. AMAZING. There are no other words in the English dictionary to describe it. That is the way that ALL documentaries should be presented.  And then, just to be even more gobsmackingly wonderful, he proceeds to do the voice of “Aunt Edna”, a fictional creation of Rattigan’s formed in an attempt to respond to his critics. Yes. Just Yes.

But it wasn’t just his voice. Oh no. He even pointed out how big his hands were in an old school photo of his. His hands. They are like no-one else’s I have ever seen. In fact, a whole blog post dedicated to them should be written by one of us sometime in the future. There simply isn’t time in this little paragraph.

Okay, so the documentary wasn’t the most thrilling piece of television that I’ll ever watch, but it did let me sit down and watch Benedict tell me, amongst other things, that his parents tried to dissuade him from becoming an actor. :O Just thank your lucky stars, readers (if there are any of you out there) that they didn’t succeed. The whole world would be a different, much sadder and emptier place. 

So thank you, Benedict, for walking around in your beautiful suit, waving your fantastic hands and speaking in your delightful voice for a whole hour last night. Please do more documentaries. Or even just TV appearances in general.

BB J

"The dress rehearsal itself was also pretty spectacularly awful" 

          -- BenMaBeb himself on The 1936 Rattigan play French Without Tears.