Benedict Cumberbatch has fallen in love with an overweight civil servant called Christopher. 'I am enamoured of his principles, his virtue and the goodness he stands for,' he says, grinning the wonky grin of the hopelessly smitten. 'I love him. I really do think that Christopher Tietjens is the character I'm most fond of ever having played.'
Tietjens needs all the love he can get. The anti-hero of Parade's End – a tetralogy of novels written by Ford Madox Ford in the 1920s, about the life and relationships of Tietjens before and during the First World War, and now adapted by Tom Stoppard into a five-part television drama – may be intellectually sharp, but he's physically cumbersome and all but incapable of articulating the emotion buried beneath his ungainly exterior. 'As Tietjens saw the world, you didn't "talk",' Ford writes. 'Perhaps you didn't even think about how you felt.'
Cumberbatch's performance, in an ambitious series co-produced by the BBC with the American network HBO, is mesmerising; it is further proof of his knack for making even the most peculiar characters seem overwhelmingly human. While his Sherlock Holmes, the character that made him a household name and bona fide heart-throb, may share a certain cruel wit with his Tietjens, in other ways the two figures could hardly be more different. If Sherlock zips breakneck across the screen like a jet ski, Tietjens glides, with the stately movement of an ocean liner. Where Sherlock arrives at the truth by employing what Cumberbatch calls his 'sociopathic, motormouth deducting genius', Tietjens seems to carry it within him.
His Tietjens is the kind of man who will pore over the Encyclopaedia Britannica, scribbling corrections in the margin, while the nation stands on the brink of war, and his wife (Rebecca Hall) – a volatile beauty who is openly cheating on him with another man – hurls insults at him across the breakfast table. 'He tries to kill her with kindness,' Cumberbatch says. 'But what she really wants from him is to be told to stop f***ing around, not be mollycoddled and treated as damaged goods.'
READ MORE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9459441/Benedict-Cumberbatch-returns-in-Parades-End.html
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