Have we reached peak Benedict Cumberbatch?

How classy! How traditional! How tragic! Last week, a small notice in a national newspaper’s Births, Marriages & Deaths section announced actor Benedict Cumberbatch’s engagement to theatre director Sophie Hunter. Cue more Cumber-crazed column inches than you can shake a deerstalker at.

The 38-year-old was already as ubiquitous as the John Lewis penguin, but this news tipped us into full pashmina-wringing, hormonal hysteria.

He’s in two films before Christmas: Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, out this Friday, and the third Hobbit movie in a few weeks. Frankly, there’s no escape from his otter-face and preposterous name. So it’s time to raise a head above the cultural parapet and ask the taboo question: have we reached, or indeed passed, peak Cumberbatch?

Until 2010, Benny Cumbo was just a jobbing actor with high cheekbones and waxy-smooth skin. It was landing the lead in the Beeb’s Sherlock Holmes reboot that gave his career a big boot up the backside and spawned the self-styled “Cumberbitches” - an online legion of fawning fans who get their Spanx in a faux-twist but are old enough to know better. He’s now firmly among those famous men that middle-class women pretend to lust after.

The media like to go along with the myth that when Cummerbund announced his engagement, there were mass outbreaks of mourning, weeping, clothes-rending and caterwauling. There weren’t.

A few half-arsed tweets, the odd wistful sigh, then everyone forgot about it. Like George Clooney or Ryan Gosling, Clunkyclutch is essentially a bland presence with fine bone structure onto whom fanciers can project their vanilla fantasies.

In my day job as TV critic, Blundersnatch first came to my attention in 2004, when he starred in BBC drama Hawking, about Professor Steve’s years as a PhD student at Cambridge. He was excellent and Bafta-nominated, but little did we know the headline-hogging monster he’d become over the next decade.

It’s not like his filmography is chock-full of modern classics. He voices a dragon in the interminably tedious Hobbit franchise. He does that Brit-in-Hollywood thing of playing baddies: frowning a lot as Khan in the so-so Star Trek sequel and getting a John Inman makeover to play Julian Assange in that awful Fifth Estate film.

He was good as Christopher Tietjens in forgettable period drama Parade’s End (although playing an uptight toff was hardly a stretch) and pretty spectacular in the stage version of Frankenstein. But does a second-tier thesp really merit being on Time magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World? Does he buggery.

Cumberlandcurl is gifted but not stratospherically so. Off the top of my head, I can name a dozen Brit actors of Cucumberpatch’s generation who are just as good. Let’s see: Ben Whishaw, Tom Hardy, Lennie James, Rafe Spall, Stephen Graham, David Tennant, Andrew Garfield, Michael Sheen, Hugh Dancy, Matthew Macfadyen, James McAvoy and Chiwetel Ejiofor. None of them are on the cover of the Daily Mail every time they arch an eyebrow.

Sure, he’s charismatic in Sherlock - but so are his co-stars, especially Martin Freeman as Doctor Watson and Andrew Scott as scenery-chomping villain Moriarty. Yet those two aren’t a ubiquitous smirking presence on chat shows and red carpets. Fictional luvvie Steven Toast from Channel 4 sitcom Toast Of London, who always greets Cumberbatch’s name with an irritated “Who?”, must be the only person in Britain who doesn't know who he is.

^{Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes}

^{in BBC drama Sherlock}

As “consulting detective and high-functioning socipoath” Holmes, Coddlethatch is essentially a long-faced luvvie being rude to people. He gets to do all the whizzy deduction and make himself seem clever, while swishing around in a £1500 overcoat. We’d all look pretty damn cool doing that. He’s a hipster’s idea of a hero. A broadsheet Sean Bean. Laurence Olivier for the Candy Crush generation.

“He’s so adorably normal!” is one platitude that Custardcatch devotees tend to squeal. No, he isn’t: he’s from aristo stock, his parents are both actors, he’s Harrow-educated, LAMDA-trained and Kensington-raised. He threw a hissy fit and threatened to leave the country over “posh-bashing”. His name’s Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch, for God’s sake. You don’t find many of them working in call centres or coffee chains. They’d struggle to fit it on a name badge, for a start.

Ever eager for approval, Dumbleditch jumped on the feminist T-shirt bandwagon quicker than you can say "twee handwritten font". Ditto with the Ice Bucket Challenge, turning up the charidee show-off factor by doing it not once but six times - having been nominated by Juno Temple and Tom Hiddleston, then himself nominating Harvey Weinstein and Kylie Minogue. Quite the celeb back-slapping session. How kind of him to let us mere mortals watch and admire his moral superiority.

I know what you’re thinking: I’m just jealous. But I’m not really. I wouldn’t mind Conkermatch’s career in some ways, or perhaps his face, but there’s no seething, bitter envy. Just bafflement that someone so nice-but-meh can become so universally fawned over.

I wish Eggs Benedict and his fragrant fiancée a happy engagement and lovely wedding. I’m looking forward to his Hamlet, a few of his film projects and more Sherlock. In the meantime, though, please can everyone stop chuntering on about him? He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very haughty boy.