Free Benedict Cumberbatch by Justin Lewis

Alan Partridge, Little Britain
and
The League of Gentlemen
. Plus, quite apart from
The Archers
, it broadcasts several hours of drama every week: a classic serial on Sundays, drama serials in the mornings as part of
Woman’s Hour
, and afternoon plays every day from Monday to Saturday.
    For the most part, Cumberbatch’s radio work has consisted of single plays, serials and book readings. He first appeared on Radio 4 in September 2003 when he featured as Edmund in an adaptation of Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park
, broadcast as a daily serial over two weeks as part of
Woman’s Hour
. Within a year, he was a regular voice on the network, as a performer in single dramas and serials, as a narrator of feature material, and as a reader of book adaptations both of fiction and non-fiction. His first lead role in a radio drama came in June 2004, shortly after the broadcast of
Hawking
on television. He was Captain RobCollins in
The Biggest Secret
, a play specially written by Mike Walker to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Normandy Landings, otherwise known as D-Day and broadcast on 5 June, the eve of the event. Collins is recovering in a hospital after being injured in a parachute drop, and is pleasantly surprised to be recalled for action.
    From here on, Cumberbatch was all over the Radio 4 airwaves: reading books by Christopher Isherwood, Honoré de Balzac and Patrick O’Brian, reworkings of Homer’s
The Odyssey
, Paul Scott’s
The Raj Quartet
and Frederic Raphael’s adaptation of his own novel,
The Glittering Prizes
. He would play Dudley Moore in an original play about the
Beyond the Fringe
cast of Moore, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller. He would assume the guise of the prodigious but self-destructive Romantic poet Thomas Chatterton, whose untimely death occurred in 1770 when he was still in his teens. Furthermore, he would give a first-class performance of the American T.S. Eliot in
Tom and Viv
, about the breakdown of his first marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood (Lia Williams).
    Elsewhere in the radio schedules, he read from Franz Kafka’s nightmarish
Metamorphosis
(about a man who finds he has been transformed into a ‘monstrous vermin’), and from a newly written biography about Giacomo Casanova. But in his large body of work for radio, two projects have risen above everything else. One is a legal drama in which he stars as a character he has loved since childhood. The other is an original situation comedy.
    The legal drama gave him the chance to be involved in theworld of Horace Rumpole, the barrister created by John Mortimer (another ex-Harrovian, incidentally). Rumpole, let’s remember, was the character who almost made Cumberbatch abandon acting for a career in law, until he realised he was obsessed by the man. In 2009, he teamed up with Timothy West to portray two ages of Rumpole. West would play a senior version, reflecting on his early days in the profession in the 1950s and 60s, while Cumberbatch would appear in the flashbacks as ‘Young Rumpole’. As of late 2013, seven of Mortimer’s Rumpole cases have been adapted most effectively by Richard Stoneman.
    Despite showing a great deal of potential in his youth as a comedy performer, Cumberbatch has rarely tackled knockabout humour in his professional career, but
Cabin Pressure
, a Radio 4 sitcom first broadcast in 2008, has been a glorious, hilarious exception to the rule. Written by John Finnemore, previously a writer for
Dead Ringers
and David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s sketch shows,
Cabin Pressure
followed the misadventures of the staff of the most cash-strapped charter airline, which had only four staff and one aeroplane.
    Cumberbatch starred as Captain Martin Crieff, a pilot who had taken seven attempts to gain his licence, and who had accepted responsibility on the condition that he came very cheap. The other three regular cast members were Stephanie Cole as the bossy founder of MJN Air, Carolyn Knapp-Shappey, Finnemore as Arthur