Awards ceremonies are a tremendous bore, and you know it. The only real perk of them comes when you’re higher up on the fancy scale of awards when the ceremonies start offering free booze. It’s then that you’re definitely on to a winner. But even then, if you’ve somehow been unfortunate enough to cop a nomination, you have to ease off the gas pedal until your category has been run and won. And due to time being an annoyingly linear bastard, someone has to go last.
It is to that notion of civility and grace to which Benedict Cumberbatch, with a swish of aged brandy in a crystallised glass, proudly declares “FUCK IT!” and proceeds to get mightily jolly in the face of looming triumph.
Thanks to something of a misreading of a running order, Cumberbatch (whose middle names, for the record, are Timothy Carlton – he couldn’t just have something middling like Warren sandwiching the hoit, it had to be maximum fancy) imbibed possibly a little too much, or not quite enough depending on which side of the fence of fun you sit, at the recent GQ Men of the Year awards.
When the time came and his name was read out, the customary speech turned into an awkwardly hilarious future advertising fodder for the virtues of coffee.
Between the abject, couldn’t-even-give-a-fuck swearing, the accidental olde time verbiage, and the soon to be immortal sign off line “I’ll see you all in the loo” I think it’s safe to say that award speeches, as a performance medium, have now officially been clocked.
Photo: Neilson Barnard via Getty Images.
