Benedict Cumberbatch: Parade's End: A series to challenge Downton (THE INDEPENDENT)

With Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role and Tom Stoppard in charge of the script, the BBC's adaptation of Parade's End will threaten ITV's all-conquering drama. They talk to Gerard Gilbert

Benedict Cumberbatch is furiously scrolling through his iPhone, the actor trying to locate a quote that he believes summarises his character, Christopher Tietjens, in BBC2's upcoming period drama Parade's End. Ford Madox Ford's quartet of novels, written between 1924 and 1928, has been adapted for television by Sir Tom Stoppard.

"I've got every single script I'm sent on my mobile," says Cumberbatch distractedly, pausing briefly in order to shake hands. "There is this amazing moment in episode two when Valentine (his lover in the story) asks, 'Why do you hate your country?' and he says, 'I don't. I love every field, every hedgerow. I just hate what's been done to this country; it's been taken over by moneylenders.' And basically he goes on to define his version of Toryism, which is feudalism really."

All this is delivered in a torrent familiar to anyone who knows Cumberbatch and his restless, super-charged mind – although comparisons to his most famous creation, BBC1's Sherlock Holmes, are unwelcome. "Because I talk a lot, probably because I'm nervous, I get pinned into the same mania bracket," he says.

Parade's End follows Tietjens, "the last Tory", a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy Edwardian landowning family married to a flippant, adulterous socialite, Sylvia (Rebecca Hall). Despite public humiliation, he refuses to divorce her because of what he terms his "parade" – an outmoded code of ethics that is tested by the mass slaughter of the First World War, and then by Tietjens' growing love for a young suffragette, Valentine (played by Australian newcomer Adelaide Clemens). It's a journey, says Cumberbatch, from romanticism to modernism.


Tom Stoppard, who last wrote for the BBC way back in 1979, began work on his adaptation four years ago, long before Downton Abbey seduced the world, and what Stoppard calls "the current festival of toffery". "I was well into the thing before I'd even heard of Downton Abbey and decided not to watch it," he says, before adding that "great minds sometimes think alike".

"I remembered a friend telling me about going to dinner in a stately home and saying to his host, 'Your butler is very impressive.' The host replied: 'Not really – he buys in his chutney.' I put that into Parade's End, and then somebody said to me that Maggie Smith says something like that in Downton Abbey (it was actually in Julian Fellowes's script for Robert Altman's Gosford Park – where Maggie Smith's character dismisses 'bought marmalade… how feeble'). Anyway, I called Julian Fellowes up and he said, 'Oh, just carry on, don't worry about it' – so I took it out and then put it back in. In the end, the things that are similar between these different dramas are much, much less significant than the things that are dissimilar."


READ MORE: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/parades-end-a-series-to-challenge-downton-8026636.html