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Benedict Cumberbatch’s Mother by Helen Kreeger



Benedict Cumberbatch’s mother gave her son a name so magnificent that he was never going to be a train driver or a teacher. I wonder if it was a deliberate move. Increase his chances of being noticed, remembered.


Also, I’m pretty sure she’s answerable for my mottephobia. Not that I’m going to sue her or anything.


An actor, like her son, she was always ‘on the telly’ in England in the 60s. We called them actresses in those days – we had no idea that this would one day become a thespian-lite term. Her own name, Wanda Ventham, sounded ever so exotic. Almost everyone I knew had proper names like Harold Jones, or Margaret McPherson. I had a friend called April at primary school and I thought that was a great name and that her mum must have been very brave to put it on the birth certificate. But then she, Wanda, probably mixed with the kind of people who all gave their little boys similarly expensive names. Likely handed down through the generations with the family silver. I suppose it never occurred to her that if some financial disaster struck her family, little Benedict Cumberbatch would be fighting off every Dwayne, Tyler and Liam, or whatever the 1980s equivalent was, in the local state school. Poor Benedict might well have come home on his first day with his posh name tattooed on his forehead with a permanent marker.


A few years back I read that UK teachers dread seeing so-called chav names on the state school registers. They claimed that there is a strong correlation between these modern appellations and bad behaviour. I’m not sure that David, John and Janice, who were particularly naughty in Robert Browning Infant and Junior School way back, would have set off warning bells with their names.


In this vein I’m quite relieved that one of my nieces, who named her newborn son Cassio, lives in trendy Brighton, and not on one of the South London housing estates where her mother and I grew up.


Luckily, no such financial disaster occurred and Benedict Cumberbatch’s mother has reared a fine actor. His portrayal of a contemporary Sherlock Holmes has almost managed to outshine that perfect Holmes, Basil Rathbone, and has proved to be an equal to Jeremy Brett’s sardonic sleuth. I hadn’t believed that any other actor since these two could inhabit 221b, Baker Street with any conviction. My opinion was repeatedly justified by films, plays and TV airings presenting us with so many unHolmes-like detectives going by the name of Sherlock. Two recent examples that come to mind are Robert Downey Jr. (who is actually a great actor – see him playing Charlie Chaplin), and Rupert Everett (who seems like a nice chap, but honestly, Sherlock?). Really, it is not enough to wear a deerstalker and talk down to the local plods.


An interesting aside is that I used to work for the Abbey National Building Society in the 1980s when its head office was in Baker Street. The building covered a largish area and so incorporated several numbers, one of which was 221 – there was no b. Mail would come from all over the world addressed to Mr. Sherlock Holmes, with the hope that he could solve the writers’ problems. The Abbey National was proud of this very famous address, I was told that they employed a secretary just to deal with these letters. Rumour had it that there were even court cases where The Abbey National sued other parties who dared try to ‘claim’ this famous, albeit fictional, address.


Getting back to Wanda Ventham. She was beautiful, still is even well into her 80s, and has been a busy actor since the 1950s. As I was checking her TV and film credits, I came upon some wit’s remark that she was “almost a big star”. If getting a summons from Hollywood together with accompanying appointments for orthodontic treatment and plastic surgery is evidence of having made it, then I suppose Wanda wasn’t a big star. Nevertheless, there have been very few years, according to the IMDb list, when she didn’t have work. As a jobbing actor she has performed in almost every genre on British television, playing her part as written, no fuss, no antics. She is part of my televisual youth along with Dr. Who and I Love Lucy, neither of which she starred in as far as I know.


But, she has also, unintentionally, scarred me for life.


Born and bred in inner-city London, I, like many townies didn’t like creepy crawlies invading my space. The local way of dealing with them was to jump on them, then squish them violently beneath sandal, welly or plimsol, with enough force to ensure that there was nothing identifiable of it left once the footwear was raised. As I grew older, I became less suspicious of, and more interested in, the amazing number of six, or eight legged creatures that inhabited my world of brick and concrete. I can’t say that I loved knowing that a big spider was under my bed, or that cockroaches were waiting to see what I tipped into the rubbish chute, but I wasn’t bothered by them and commuted all death sentences.


Then came The Blood Beast Terror. Made in 1968 it was British horror of its generation - as corny as it gets. But it always hit the spot. We would scream in genuine fright even though we knew absolutely, quite some minutes beforehand, that something horrible was going to jump out of the cupboard and that the slowest person taking the group hike was going to be punctured by a vampire.


The Blood Beast Terror begins with a number of unexplained deaths of young men (is it only young women who get murdered in films nowadays?), whose bodies had been drained of blood via torn throats – a surprisingly common cause of death for this genre. The lovely Peter Cushing – who also gave us a version of Holmes, but a bit too nice in the role for my liking – played the investigating detective, and quite sensibly dismisses the sighting of a human-sized winged creature with huge eyes near to the murder scenes. Who wouldn’t? Oddly, he does consider the possibility of a homicidal eagle on the loose!


The beautiful Wanda plays the slightly strange daughter of a scientist, an entomologist. It turns out that she’s not really his daughter but one of his dastardly experiments. She transforms back and forth between a human and a giant Death Head moth. She kills to live, and the blood of young, healthy men does the job best.


The carnage was nothing much to write home about, it just gave me some healthy, superficial jitters, but the moth woman herself, flapping about with those enormous wings, touched some primitive part of my psyche. Her eventual death didn’t give me any relief. I have an image of her still, being drawn to the light of a bonfire and screaming her head off as she goes up in flames.


I was similarly unnerved when I first encountered Dr.Who’s arch enemies, the Daleks. Fortunately, there are no Daleks in my life so I don’t have to live in fear of them. But I do encounter those papery night fliers very often, especially as I now live in a part of the world where dusk invites the native flowers to give forth their wonderful, come hither, scents.


 A warm night brings fat-bodied moths to my porch. They hit the lights. If they’re big enough there’s even an accompanying ‘thud’. Many die, and even though they don’t scream à la Miss Ventham I must fight to control my panic. With sweaty palms, and no little hyperventilating, I silently curse Benedict Cumberbatch’s mother.


 

Helen Kreeger was born in England and now lives in Israel. She has many publications under her ever widening belt, in the UK, USA and Israel.


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