Max Atkinson's Blog

Speaking of the moon: Gingrich v. Kennedy

2012-01-26T18:43:00.007Z

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has told us that, by the end of his second term (about 2 minutes into the above), there would be Americans living on the moon. With enough of them there, they'd even be able to become a state of the USA.

And why not?

After all, in 1961, President Kennedy had made the first of two famous speeches about American plans to send a man to the moon. The first was to Congress (below), followed up a year later by his "We choose to go to the moon" speech at Rice University (HERE).

So if Kennedy could get away with such an ambitious goal, why not Gingrich?

Er, at least 3 reasons:

1. Kennedy had already been president for more than a year when he went public with his proposal.

2. Before that, he'd already had time to consult with the relevant experts and no doubt had a pretty good idea that a man on the moon within a decade was entirely possible.

3. Kennedy never made any colonial claims on the moon. Nor, though he may have left a US flag there, did Neil Armstrong - or anyone else.

Obama's State of the Union speech: (2) Enhanced by PowerPoint?

2012-01-25T18:20:00.007Z

When I first started watching the version of President Obama's State of the Union speech posted on YouTube by the White House, I wondered what the blue rectangle on the right hand side was for.

But all quickly became clear: it was for PowerPoint style slides and they, presumably, were what transformed it into an 'enhanced version'.

So we got to see a picture and the wordds MORE THAN 1 MILLION AMERICAN TROOPS SERVED IN IRAQ BETWEEN 2003-2011

Then a wanted poster for Osama bin Laden with a big red cross through it.

Then more pictures of US troops followed numbers of how many of them had fought in various wars.

And so on and on and on, through pictures, bar charts, graphs, diagrams lists of bullet points, on the US economy, education, etc., etc., etc.

Enhancement or distraction?

Watching this, I was left gasping, wondering who on earth in team Obama believes that his speeches are actually enhanced by such distractions, unless it was the same person who thought that background musak 'enhanced' the film of his speechwriters preparing the speech (see previous post).

Does it mean we can now expect President Obama to take a slide projector along with him during the forthcoming presidential campaign?

I think not - for the obvious reason that he's a good enough communicator to know that the words in his speeches and the way he delivers them are enough on their own to get his messages across.

What's more, I very much hope that this White House model of an 'enhanced presentation' doesn't give other lesser speakers (e.g. most British politicians) the idea that this is the way to improve their own speeches 'going forward'.

See for yourself

If you haven't seen it yet, it's well worth watching all the way through - and coming to your own conclusion as to whether the visual aids enhance or distract from what he said.

Obama's State of the Union speech: (1) Behind the scenes with the speechwriters

2012-01-25T17:46:00.004Z

Few British political speechwriters though there may be, anyone who writes any kind of speech is likely to be interested not only in this film but also by the fact that it had nearly 400,000 views on YouTube within 24 hours of being posted there.

A cunning part of team Obama's communication strategy perhaps, but there's something very refreshing about a top politician openly admitting that he gets help with his speeches and being willing to give a public platform to those who help him.

So far, I've only watched it once and found the most annoying part was the awful background musak - but the producers of the film maybe know something that I don't about how distracting noises can enhance the impact of such propaganda...

The State of the Union address itself seemed to go down pretty well. But the video posted by the White House had another major distraction - on which more shortly in Part (2).

Birdsong: open-mouthed acting by a male of the species

2012-01-23T10:27:00.012Z

Last night, Mary Ann Sieghart (@MASieghart) tweeted 'Does this actor in #Birdsong have any look other than a long meaningful one?

I knew exactly what she was referring to, as last night's hero (Eddie Redmayne) had already reminded me of a question I'd asked back in 2009: Is there an open-mouthed school of acting?

'...I don’t know if it’s just me (and the small, unrepresentative sample of people I’ve consulted so far), but it does seem that film and television actresses are spending more and more time with their mouths open – both when there’s no dialogue and when they’re listening to one of the other actors saying something – than used to be the case. Nor are those of us who’ve noticed it particularly impressed by it' (more HERE).

Men too?

Whereas I'd been prompted then by the likes of Keira Kinightley, Eddie Redmayne has now shown that men can do it too - and his open mouth is featured in 17% of the short BBC trailer posted on YouTube (above - or full version HERE).

I was intrigued to discover from the comments that I wasn't alone in having noticed the trend, and some interesting discussion emerged. If you've any more thoughts, here's a reminder of the five main questions I posed then:

'For one thing, once you’ve spotted someone doing it early on in a film, it becomes a big distraction - because you go on noticing the same actor doing it again and again. For another, it can be quite confusing trying to work out just what emotions and feelings all these open mouths are supposed to be conveying

'So here are five questions on which I'd welcome feedback:

1. Has anyone else noticed it?
2. Is it a recent trend?
3. Am I alone in finding it irritating/distracting?
4. Is open-mouthed acting being taught in drama schools?
5. If so, why?'

And another thing: an inappropriate continuity error

In the background to the pastoral scenes in early 20th century France, the only birdsong to be heard was the cooing of a dove that didn't arrive there until the 1940s (HERE).

The distinctive repetitive cooing of the collared dove has been an irritating distraction in large numbers of televised dramas set in periods long before this annoying bird had arrived and settled in the UK.

Presumably producers of television drama and nature programmes never bother to communicate with each other about such things.

Needless to say, I think it's high time that they did.

Is it wise for Ed Miliband to play snakes and ladders with Jon Snow?

2012-01-17T20:48:00.010Z

I'm grateful to Neill Harvey-Smith (@nhs999) for drawing my attention to this fascinating video clip via Twitter, where he tweeted "From the Ed Miliband treasure trove, media training lesson #24: don't do this."

The board had already been set up for the game by Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls with his Fabian Society speech and related interviews over the weekend (HERE) and now, three days later, his leader lands on this whopping snake - posted on YouTube very soon after the end of the Channel 4 News on which it appeared (as for what I mean by 'snakes and ladders', see HERE).

It vividly demonstrates the risks faced by an inexperienced interviewee when trying to hold his own against an old hand like Jon Snow and I suspect that Mr Miliband and the Labour Party must be very glad that Channel 4 News doesn't reach a mass audience.

I also think that a more technical analysis of Mr Milband's performance may well reveal some of the reasons why he's so far failed have a more positive impact on the wider public.

Watch this space...

Continued (18 January)

Jon Snow turned out to be one of several top political journalists who had been queuing up to take it in turns to interview Ed Miliband yesterday - all, judging from the background on the BBC, ITN, Sky News and Channel 4 News, in the same room.

ITN was able to edit out Tom Bradby's questions from the version posted on YouTube (below) - which would hardly have been possible with the frequency of Jon Snow's interruptions on Channel 4 News (above).

In the absence of any such things to irritate or distract Mr Miliband, he was able to produce a performance that came across as a good deal more articulate, coherent and assured than in his joust with Jon Snow.

YouTube scorecard so far:

Channel 4 News version: 3,201 viewers (22 Jan)

ITN version: 167 viewers (22 Jan)

The 'John Lewis economy': What to make of today's speech by Nick Clegg?

2012-01-16T18:16:00.011Z

Regular readers will know that I worry about how little from political speeches are shown on prime-time television news programmes these days - as compared with interviews (examined in more detail HERE).

In the discussion after my UK Speechwriters' Guild Christmas lecture last month, someone made the interesting point that was it's no longer necessary for TV companies to do this in the internet age, because keen anoraks can watch as many speeches as they like online.

Another innovation is the close coordination of 'on message' speeches and interviews, as was demonstrated rather skillfully over the weekend by Ed Balls (HERE).

But does anyone watch the speeches?

One problem with some of the speeches that appear online is that they are so earnest or uninspiring (or both) that it's difficult to imagine prime-time news programmes - even in the glory days of the past - managing to select suitable quotable quotes for transmission to a wider audience.

One such example was Nick Clegg's speech at the Mansion House earlier today. It seems to have generated two main sound bites:

a John Lewis economy
The 1980s was the decade of share ownership. I want this to be the decade of employee share ownership.

But what he actually meant by either of these (not to mention the rest of the speech) was a question being widely asked on Twitter during the day.

As I've noted before (HERE), Clegg's communication skills continue to interest me - and this video and transcript look like promising data for closer analysis - comments and suggestions welcome...

Text of this video-clip from the speech:

...we don’t believe our problem is too much capitalism: we think it’s that too few people have capital. We need more individuals to have a real stake in their firms.

More of a John Lewis economy, if you like.

And, what many people don’t realise about employee ownership is that it is a hugely underused tool in unlocking growth.

I don’t value employee ownership because I somehow believe it's it's “nicer” - a more pleasant alternative to the rest of the corporate world. Those are lazy stereotypes. Firms that have engaged employees, who own a chunk of their company, are just as dynamic, just as savvy, as their competitors. In fact, they often perform better: lower absenteeism, lower staff turnover, lower production costs. In general, higher productivity and higher wages. They even weathered the economic downturn better than other companies.

Is employee ownership a panacea? No. Does it guarantee a company will thrive? No of course not. But the evidence and success stories cannot be ignored, and we have to tap this well if we are serious about growth. The 1980s was the decade of share ownership. I want this to be the decade of employee share ownership.

Britons win gold and silver in the transatlantic rowing race: an omen for the Olympics?

2012-01-15T17:02:00.008Z

BOX NUMBER 8 WINS AND ANDREW BROWN BREAKS A WORLD RECORD from Talisker Whisky on Vimeo.

On 5th December, we watched 17 rowing boats leave the harbour at San Sebastian La Gomera at the start of a transatlantic rowing race and, after getting home, have been following its ups and downs ever since.

Last night (40 days later), first and second places went to British rowers who arrived in Barbados 26 minutes apart - with the next boat more than 100 nautical miles away.

Rowing across the Atlantic may have yet to qualify as an official Olympic sport, but it would be nice to think that their success will be an omen for more medals for our competitors later in the year.

At the time of writing, the bronze medal contenders are only 47 nautical miles from the finish and you can keep up with the race HERE.

A gentleman who is for turning: snakes or ladders weekend for Ed Balls?

2012-01-14T14:43:00.011Z

Thanks to a speech to the Fabian Society (above) and endless interviews by Ed Balls (e.g. below), this weekend has been alive with the sound of turning in the mainstream media, blogs and on Twitter.

Under a headline 'This is new all right. it just isn't enough', John Rentoul of the Independent on Sunday tells us 'Ed Balls caught up with where the Labour Party should have been 16 month ago. It was an important moment...' (more HERE).

The New Statesman is rather less optimistic, with an article by Owen Jones telling us 'Ed Balls' surrender is a political disaster' (more HERE).

And, perhaps not surprisingly, the unions aren't too pleased by what looks like rather sudden U turn from Mr Balls - see Unions criticise Ed Balls's pay freeze comments on the BBC website HERE.

Snake, ladder or both?

For me, I find myself wondering how the speech and interviews by Mr Balls fit in (or not) with the snakes and ladders theory of political communication, which proposes that interviews work like snakes for politicians (by attracting negative news coverage) and speeches work like ladders (by attracting positive news coverage) - for more on which HERE.

But here we have an example of a politician staying consistently 'on message' - and a highly controversial one at that - both in a speech and related interviews.

There's no doubt that a message has got across (though to how many over a weekend?) and, given how little of the speech was actually to be seen or heard on broadcast news programmes, this probably had more to do with the interviews than his Fabian Society lecture.

However, whether it's had (or will have) a positive or negative otcome for Mr Balls and the Labour Party, only time will tell.

Polish lawyer shoots himself while waiting for Miliband's speech

2012-01-10T17:25:00.012Z

While I was waiting to hear Ed Milband's speech earlier today, I was seriously distracted by a macabre piece of news footage, in which a Polish lawyer shoots himself during a five minute break that he'd just requested.

And if that wasn't bizarre enough, he missed and, at the time of writing, is still alive (more on which HERE).

So anyone expecting to read about Miliband's 'relaunch' speech will, I'm afraid, have to wait...

Update, 11 January:

Injury 'not life-threatening' - interview from hospital bed HERE.

The 'fluent but insincere and shallow' Kelvin Mackenzie at the Leveson Inquiry

2012-01-09T12:33:00.016Z

This particular sequence from former editor of The Sun Kelvin MacKenzie's evidence to the Leveson Inquiry is [was - see below] featured on the websites of both the BBC and Sky News today.

Are we supposed, I wonder, to be impressed by his brilliant 'analysis' of the difference between the verbs 'to lob' and 'to chuck'? And is anyone convinced that it aptly illustrates his point that "we thought about something and then put it in"?

I suppose it would be too much to expect him to tell us which 'online dictionery' he consulted to get his definition of the verb 'to lob', but it's an easy enough game for anyone to play.

So, having just looked up the word 'glib' in the Oxford online dictionary, I can report that the definition looks like a fairly accurate description of Mr MacKenzie (and his words):

glib

adjective

(of words or a speaker) fluent but insincere and shallow.

P.S. Since this was first posted earlier today, the clip has been removed from the Sky News website. But you can still watch it on the BBC website HERE and HERE.

In the absence of any explanation of why it was withdrawn, one can't help wondering whether this is a case of one Murdoch-owned media outlet (Sky News) retrospectively altering its news coverage to protect the former editor of another (The Sun) - in which case, it should perhaps be reported to the Leveson Inquiry forthwith.

Michael Gove speech sends students to sleep

2012-01-06T11:56:00.008Z

Yesterday I was thanking Diane Abbott for adding to my collection of interviewees walking out of interviews (HERE).

Today, my thanks go to former deputy Prime Minister John Prescott (@johnprescott) for re-tweeting this gem posted by Political Scrapbook (@PSbook), where some interesting comments have already begun to appear.

For me, it poses at least three questions:

If the first thing to be done when preparing a speech is to analyse the audience (see my books), one has to ask who writes this stuff?
As taxpayers, are we getting value for money from the speechwriters at the Department of Education?
And, as a former president of the Oxford Union and debating adjudicator, shouldn't Gove be able to do rather better than this when it comes to addressing an audience of school children?

More on our esteemed Secretary of State for Education

Interview exit strategies (3): Diane Abbott's mobile phone comes to the rescue

2012-01-05T12:32:00.009Z

Today I have to thank Diane Abbott MP for adding to my small collection of politicians walking out of an interview (for others, see below).

This is the first one in which the interviewee's mobile phone came to the rescue at a particularly awkward point in the questioning - silent though the ring seems to have been.

Could it, I wonder, be a neat ploy that becomes a precedent for many more such 'escapes' in the future?

Classic interview exits:

Putin speechwriting competition result: nepotism rules, OK...

2012-01-03T10:26:00.013Z

The 'Prose for Putin Christmas speech writing competition' was launched on 15 December (HERE) and invited contestants to 'write a short speech outlining Mr Putin's message to supporters and/or opponents for 2o12.'

I suppose there was something inevitable about the fact that it would take a fluent Russian speaker to catch the language and mood of Mr Putin with the precision achieved by David Atkinson (@dsa99uk), winner of the first prize.

Nepotism?

The fact that he also happens to be my big brother (and knows where I live) is surely an added bonus, implying as it does that a degree of corruption may have influenced the judge's decision - with the possibility of more corruption to come: as the lucky winner already has signed copies of Lend Me Your Ears (both in English and Russian), he may be disappointed if he thinks he's going to get yet another free copy...

Runner-up

Winner of the second prize, Daniel Sandberg need have no fears about getting his copy of Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy. Nor was his footnote - 'If my English is not always up to scratch, the reason is that I am Norwegian' - in the least bit necessary.

FIRST PRIZE: David Atkinson

People who describe my party as the 'party of thieves and crooks' should go f**k a sheep and use one of their stupid white ribbons as a condom.

For Hillary Clinton, before she gets in too deep, I’ve just two words. She should listen, and stop paying prostitutes to parade round Moscow wearing white ribbons that look like condoms.

The words for Hillary are ‘Monica Lewinsky’.

I have an agreement with Prokhorov, who is standing against me as President, same as I told Khodokovsky, keep out of politics and keep out of f***ing jail.

That Islamist arselicker of a French journalist who asked me about innocent Chechens getting killed should remember what happens to journalists in our modern Russia. If he comes to Moscow we’ll have him circumcised and when he’s under the knife castrate him as well.

And while we are on the subject, if anyone else says I’ve had plastic surgery, I’ll send the boys round and rearrange their faces for them.

I’ve got some words for the citizens of Londongrad, who thought they were clever voting for the Rotten Apple Party. I know how to stuff ballot boxes better than you. You won’t be coming home to Mother Russia while I am in charge, unless you want nailing to the wall of a Chechen shithouse.

As for that corrupt former Lada salesman, who can’t decide whether he lives in SW3 or Tel Aviv - He calls himself an oligarch with only a couple of billion left - Why is he suing Roman in London? I’ll tell you why. It’s because he knows he’d lose in Moscow.

Come on home Boris. There’s a room waiting for you at the Moscow Lubyanka. Then you can join that son of a Boris (Khodorkovsky) in the Novy Gulag.

Just remember Rotten Apple voters of London, I know where you f***ing live.

SECOND PRIZE: Daniel Sandberg

Citizens of Russia,

On the eve of a new year, we like to reflect on events which have passed. And we ask ourselves what is to come. Paradoxically, looking back in time often helps us to see the future in a clearer light. This year, we marked the 20th anniversary of the demise of the Soviet Union. I once called the breakup of the Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century. I stand by those words. With the end of the Soviet Union came a period of instability which had agonising effects on Russia. It severely hurt our economy, our security, and our international reputation. Yeltsin’s breakneck economic policies enriched a few, but shattered the lives of ordinary citizens who lost their life savings. Many of those who benefited the most now sit in prison or abroad in their multi-million ruble mansions, criticising us who stayed behind to clear the rubble after Yeltsin’s failed attempts to govern our country. Civil wars threatened to unravel Chechnya and former countries of the Soviet Union. Our armed forces were thrown into disarray. Internationally, Russia became an object of ridicule, a drifting ship with a drunk captain at the steering wheel. And so came a unipolar world, a world where one Western country thought it could decide what was right and wrong, and intervened as it liked. A world where other countries seemed to be more concerned about our internal affairs than their own. When I became president – twelve years ago to the day – I decided that I would right these wrongs.

I promised to rebuild our economy. Today, it is as strong as ever. We have been able to protect our economy from the economic crisis. Our neighbours envy us our economic growth. Every day, we replenish our stabilisation fund, so that we will not have to relive the economic disaster of the 1990s.

I promised to restore peace. The transformation of Grozny into a thriving capital speaks for itself. We have helped our friends and partners in South Ossetia and Abkhazia secure their independence. Our fighters and strategic bombers are again flying above and along our territory. Our brave sailors are protecting Russian merchant ships against pirate attacks in the Indian ocean. And our peacekeepers have calmed tensions in many parts of the world.

I promised to restore Russia’s reputation. Over the past years, I have attended countless meetings in the UN, in the OSSE, in the NATO-Russia Council. And I can tell you: nobody ridicules Russia anymore. We are again a respected international player. We again live in a multipolar world. We can again be proud of being Russian.

Fellow citizens,

If the demise of the Soviet Union has taught us one lesson, it is this: uncontrolled change leads to chaos. Of course, the thought of change can be refreshing. Who does not like to see change from time to time? But change brings uncertainty. Uncertainty carries risk. And when risk materialises, the impact can be devastating.

Why do I say this? I have, of course, taken note of the demonstrations in Moscow, St. Petersburg and a few other places. I know that many of you do not identify with the protesters, who only make up a small percentage of our population. But I also know that some of you do. I am your prime minister, and I take you seriously. I have to admit that I struggle to understand the protests. When I listen to the allegations, they describe a reality which I do not recognise. When I read the slogans, I cannot see any solutions being offered. When I watch the demonstrators, I fail to see any leaders. Still, we have noted your grievances. President Medvedev has ordered an investigation into concrete complaints of election fraud. I have proposed that regional governors again be elected by the people. We have announced plans to make it easier to establish political parties and to register as a presidential candidate. And I have decided to renew my political team. Some of you may say that this is not enough. I agree. It is not sufficient. We face serious challenges: A declining population. An economy which needs modernisation. An army which must be further professionalised. These are daunting obstacles, but they can be overcome. What is needed is stability, firmness and – most of all – an experienced leader. That is why I have announced my candidacy for President in March 2012. Where others offer division, I offer you unity. Where others offer promises, if offer you results. Where others offer you uncertainty, I offer you a future.

Fellow citizens,

Twenty years ago, it was not clear which way Russia would take. After a period of aimless change and confusion under Yeltsin, we managed to restore Russia to its former greatness. It has been an honour to serve as your prime minister during the past four years. It will be an even greater honour to serve again as your President. Whether you are a citizen of Kaliningrad or Vladivostok, whether your home is in Murmansk or Irkutsk, I want you to know that I shall work tirelessly for you, for your family, for your future. We are united by the love of our history, our traditions and our culture. Together, we can achieve things our ancestors could only dream of.

I wish you a happy new year.

Video clips of the month, 2011

2011-12-31T12:36:00.005Z

Regular readers will know that this blog often includes video clips to illustrate points discussed in different posts.

So, as on this day last year, here's one from each month of the year highlighting themes that seemed worth blogging about:

January

50 years since John F Kennedy asked not ...

February

More 3-part lists and a touch of management speak from Obama on Egypt

March

Memorable speeches in Berlin revisited

April

'Inward cutter' in the Archbishop of Canterbury's Easter sermon

May

President Obama's speech at Westminster awarded a B-

June

How many numbers can you get into 20 seconds? Balls v. Brown

July

James Murdoch backs Rebekah Brooks, but not without pausing every 2 seconds

August

Yvette Cooper's precisely timed response to a contrast from Ed Miliband

September

Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?

October

Osborne finds the Tories more enthusiastic about the coalition than a year ago

November

Murdoch, the Mafia and the manufacture of a misleading soundbite

December

More gobbledygook from the Archbishop of Canterbury

Does Nick Clegg's new year message work for you?

2011-12-28T19:10:00.011Z

Last week, I asked whether Ed Miliband's Christmas message to our armed forces worked for you, to which the comments received suggested that the answer was "No" (HERE).

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's 'New Year message' has raised the same question for me: "I don't think this quite works, but have yet to figure out exactly why. Comments and/or suggestions welcome..."

More gobbledygook from the Archbishop of Canterbury in his Christmas sermon

2011-12-25T20:33:00.012Z

I wasn't planning to do a blog post today, but couldn't resist it when I saw this clip from the Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas day sermon.

On previous occasions, I've noted what a hopeless communicator he is (e.g. Inward clutter' in the Archbishop of Canterbury's Easter sermon and What does a 147 sentence word sound like?).

Here's another masterpiece. At only 53 words, it may be only about three and a half times longer that the average number of words per sentence in an effective speech (16 words), But does anyone (other than perhaps him) have a clue what it means?

"Whether it is an urban rioter, mindlessly burning down a small shop that serves his community, or a speculator turning his back on the question of who bears the ultimate cost for his acquisitive adventures in the virtual reality of today's financial world, the picture is of atoms spinning apart in the dark."

Other gems from the sermon quoted on the BBC website (HERE) included:

"And the almost forgotten words of the Long Exhortation in the Communion Service, telling people what questions they should ask themselves before coming to the Sacrament, show a keen critical awareness of the new economic order that, in the mid 16th century, was piling up assets of land and property in the hands of a smaller and smaller elite" (60 words).

And the much briefer, but equally unintelligible:

"The Prayer Book is a treasury of words and phrases that are still for countless English-speaking people the nearest you can come to an adequate language for the mysteries of faith."

Atoms spinning apart in the dark?
Meanwhile, Ed Miliband appointed Tim Livesey, a former adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury as his chief of staff only a few days ago. As it said in the Guardian 'Livesey...has been involved in some of the archbishop's more controversial speeches, including one suggesting that sharia law was inevitable in the UK.'

Maybe Miliband knows something we don't, or maybe Livesey isn't as barmy as his former boss.

But it's going to be interesting to see whether or not he's able to give the Labour Party good value for money and their leader some some much needed improvement in his speech-making...

Is there still time to learn from a video of yourself speaking to an audience?

2011-12-23T09:20:00.007Z

Caught on camera

Browsing through YouTube the other day, I was suprised - and not sure whether to be flattered or annoyed - to come across this clip from a lecture I gave in Copenhagen last year.

Yes, I may have spent decades making, collecting and commenting on videotapes of other people speaking. But, like so many others, I don't much like watching myself in action - which raises the question of why I've decided to draw attention to it with this post?

The short answer is that it made me realise how very few clips I've ever seen of myself actually speaking to an audience. So it gives me a chance to treat my performance as data and to analyse where there might be room for improvement - if it's not too late for that.

It also gives anyone else a chance to do the same - and especially those of you who've had to put up with my feedback on your efforts during courses or coaching sessions. It only seems fair to let you have a chance get your own back on me.

For what they're worth, here are a few of the things that occurred to me.

Pluses & minuses?

Eye-contact with the audience was better than I'd expected, and I was gratified to hear a few laughs from the audience so close to the start of the lecture, when getting their attention is so crucial.

The pace of the delivery also rather surprised me. I don't know whether I pause as often or for as long as I do here when I'm speaking to native speakers of English, but did wonder whether it was rather too slow and ponderous. I was, however, very conscious that almost everyone in this particular audience was a native speaker of Danish.

Mumbling monotone?

There were moments of mumbling that took me back to my first attempts at lecturing more than forty years ago. I was aware then that even the remnants (?) of a Yorkshire accent can come across as flat and monotonous to those who come from anywhere else, and that sounding a bit livelier was something that I was always going to have to work hard at - on this evidence: "still room for improvement."

Where's his jacket?

In a previous blog post (HERE), I recalled a course that I'd attended more than 4o years ago:

"... while I was being video-taped doing a lecture on a course for new university lecturers, the studio lights were so hot that I took my jacket off. At the feedback session, it became a matter for discussion: the tutor stopped the tape with the words, “Here’s a speaker who really means business.” Though nothing could have been further from the truth, the realisation that some people might see it that way has made jacket removal a routine prelude to almost every lecture I have ever given since then."

I still don't know whether speaking in shirtsleeves gives the impression that I "really mean business". What I do know that it helps to keep the sweat under control, which makes me feel marginally more comfortable than would otherwise be the case.

Nor, until or unless someone makes a very strong case that I shouldn't do it, is it something that I plan to do any differently in the near future.

Retirement beckons?

And a near future is all that's left to one who's already qualified for the old age pension and a bus-pass. Gone are the days from a distant past when I used to worry that audiences would think me too young to be taken seriously.

Today, the problem has become the opposite: how are you to know if and when an audience thinks that you're past your sell-by date and really ought to pack it in forthwith?

On the basis of this video clip (aided and abetted by the bias of my own eyes and ears) he doesn't look or sound too much like an old fogey (yet).

But will he ever know when to stop and how will he ever know when that time has arrived - unless he starts to forget crucial points he was planning to mention, falls off the stage or comes across as a doddering old fool?

For all he knows, he may be already there - and might even have been there for quite a while.

So maybe the answer should come from the world of sport - where the sensible few retire before they start losing (or get dropped from the team) - in which case, the safest option may be to call it a day sooner rather than later...

Does Ed Miliband's Christmas message to the forces work for you?

2011-12-20T11:48:00.007Z

I don't think this quite works, but have yet to figure out exactly why.

Comments and/or suggestions welcome...

See also:

Write a Christmas/New Year message for Vladimir Putin

Prose for Putin: Christmas speechwriting competition, 2011

2011-12-15T12:37:00.012Z

The best laid plans of mice, men and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin don't always go as smoothly as intended (e.g. HERE).

So, for this year's Christmas competition, you are cordially invited to write a short speech outlining Mr Putin's message to supporters and/or opponents for 2o12.

Prizes

As usual, the winner will receive a signed copy of Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Making Speeches and Presentations with a signed copy of Speech-Making and Presentation Made Easy for the runner up.

How to enter

Entries in Comments below and/or email before midnight on 31 December 2011 (see 'View my complete profile' in left hand column for link).

A blog for all seasons

2011-12-13T10:30:00.009Z

Although I took my laptop with me on a recent holiday in the Canary Islands, I found it surprisingly easy not to take it out of its case for a whole week. That meant no blogging, no tweeting and getting out of habit if doing either.

A further incentive to do neither came from the curious fact that, in spite of no new blog posts during that period, the number of blog hits increased dramatically - and now averages twice as many as usual.

All has now been explained by a bit of rather obvious research.

Three years ago, I posted The Office Christmas Party: roads to failure and success.

Two years ago, I posted Christmas competition:What did Santa say before 'Ho-ho-ho'?.

60% of today's visits landed on one or other of these posts after Google searches for things like 'christmas party speeches' and 'christmas santa'.

The moral of the story for bloggers wanting to attract more visitors seems obvious: go through a calendar of the year and devise 'topical' posts for all seasons that will be come up on search engines year after year after year after year. Whether or not I can be bothered, however, remains to be seen...

Oxford puts degrees (and gowns) from other universities in their place

2011-11-28T09:10:00.012Z

The annual College Record of the Oxford college where I was a Fellow for twelve enjoyable years has just arrived via snail-mail, revealing that one of the more bizarre manifestations of the university's superiority complex is still very much in evidence.

MA, Oxford?

I had arrived there after teaching at 'plate glass' (Lancaster) and 'red brick' (Manchester) universities, having previously acquired a 'red brick' BA and a 'plate glass' PhD. Such qualifications were not, however, enough for me to be allowed to supervise graduate students in as hallowed a place as Oxford. For that, I also had to acquire a locally awarded 'MA'.

For graduates of Oxford University, the normal route is pretty straightforward: all you have to do after your first degree is not to take any more exams, wait around for a few years and pay a fee for your BA to be automatically 'upgraded' to an MA.

For the rest of us to be allowed anywhere near a graduate student, we first had to be elevated to 'MA Status', achieved by the even simpler procedure of signing a form, returning it to the university offices and paying nothing at all.

MA Status, Oxford?

The year before this happened to me, my name in the College Record was followed by 'BA Reading, PhD, Essex'. The following year, the actual degrees were relegated to their proper place, i.e. in brackets after the more important news: 'MA Status (BA, Reading, PhD, Essex)'.

In the latest College Record, the brackets after names are still there, but 'MA Status' has been replaced by 'MA' - thereby implying that the person in question had been a proper Oxford graduate all along and in the first place, even if s/he had had to spend a few years somewhere else to pick up another degree or two.

One name on the current list caught my attention as something that might amuse (or annoy) American readers and/or graduates of Cambridge (England), followed as it is by: 'MA (BA Harvard, MSA George Washington, PhD Cambridge)'.

Q: What to wear for tea on an Oxford college lawn?

Nor was the elevation of fake local 'degrees' above proper degrees from other places the only evidence of Oxford asserting itself. 'MA Status' also entitled you to wear proper dress for formal dinners and other official occasions (i.e. an Oxford MA gown and hood - top right).

Each year, those of us blessed with 'MA Satus' would also get a luxurious-looking invitation, edged in gold leaf, to Encaenia (the honorary degree ceremony), followed by tea and strawberries on the Vice-Chancellor's college lawn.

At the bottom there was another invitation inviting you to turn over the page - where there was a reassuring message that, if my memory serves me correctly, went as follows:

'Graduates of universities other than Oxford and Cambridge may like to know that, on this occasion, they are permitted to wear the academic robes of their originating institutions.'

A: Robes by Essex man

So one year, mainly for my own amusement and education (as I'd never seen them before then), I went to the expense of hiring Essex PhD robes (above left) - designed in the 1960s by Hardy Amies, a local Essex boy who'd become dress-designer to the Queen.

That, you might think, should impress the locals with a real touch of class - except that I'm pretty sure it didn't...

Hugh Grant: more articulate as himself than in the parts he plays

2011-11-24T11:54:00.021Z

A few weeks ago, after hearing a presentation by Melvyn Bragg, I made the point that effective broadcasters aren't necessarily as effective when it comes to public speaking (HERE).

I've also commented on how famous actors, with the notable exception of Ronald Reagan, aren't always particularly effective at making speeches either:

'But then why should anyone expect actors to be any good at speech-making?

'After all, their skill is to deliver other people’s lines in a way that portrays characters other than themselves, which is a very different business from writing your own lines and coming across as yourself.

'Politically active thespians like Glenda Jackson, M.P., and Vanessa Redgrave may be admired for their successful acting careers, but neither of them is particularly impressive when it comes to making political speeches.

'In fact, the only example of an actor who did become a great public speaker that I can think of is Ronald Reagan, but he’d already been rolling his own speeches on the lecture circuit for General Electric long before he became Governor of California...' (more HERE)

An articulate spokesman
Hugh Grant's appearance at the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking (e.g. above), as well as some of his earlier performances on Newsnight and Question Time, suggests that he might be another interesting exception that proves a rule, namely that a professional actor can sometimes come across as far more articulate in person than as the stuttering bumbling characters they've become best known for playing in their films.

In fact, having watched him doing both, I'm beginning to think that he must be a rather better actor than I'd originally thought:

700th blog post: English and the problem of communicating with foreigners

2011-11-22T11:03:00.035Z

First, a very big thank you to everyone who came up with ideas after my Twitter appeal about my 700th blog post. There were so many good ones, plus some funny and some verging on the obscure, that I was initially tempted to reproduce the list (below) and leave it at that:

What, in your opinion, is the greatest speech ever - and why? @MartinShovel
Sound-bite culture and the death of political oratory? @lordbonkers
Relationship btw written text and spoken word? @dirkvl
How should scientists address the public? @nhsgooroo
How to keep your presentation fresh after you've done it 700 times @podiumcoaching
How about something involving 7 - like your 7 favourite posts from the last 699, or your top 7 tips for a public speaker? @philpresents
What about great female speakers? Or what attributes women have to be powerful speakers versus their male cntrprts. @frankluempers
"Why?", "10 things I learnt thru blogging", "If I started again...", "The next 300..." ... ;-) @cuchullainn
1400th century history as it was 700 years ago. @campbellclaret
Speeches that aren't famous but should be. What have we missed that was amazing? @karinjr
The impact of luck on your life -- Lucky #700 or reverse the no's & be cryptic as in 007. @wendycherwinski
Something I've always remembered from 1 of yr books - why audiences pay less attention than indivs. Always stuck with me @DillyTalk
Speechmaking in multilingual events @HadleighRoberts
Using religious imagery/metaphors in public speaking? @carlquilliam
A recap of your favorites or most popular posts @TravisDahle
How about a post highlighting your 10 favorites? It would be nice to "unbury" those posts & give them new life @MrMediaTraining
Studyof rhetoric in The Lord's Prayer @aaronwood
"The 7 Deadly Sins of The Lonesome Speaker"? @MarionChapsal
After 700 posts, what haven't you written about? @johnwatkis
Something hearkening back to order in the court? Categorisation in the production of contrast pairs? @Edward_Reynolds
"On lists of 10, counting, numbers and facts" @Edward_Reynolds
Consider issues raised in my field e.g a speaker makes a joke, the EN audience laugh, the FR needs interpret. & laughs... @HadleighRoberts
Also, given your emphasis on words and structure, does interpreting (meaning and concepts) ultimately ruin a speech? @HadleighRoberts
There's an idea for your 700th post: write it in French! @philpresents
Voilà une idée qu'elle est bonne! @MarionChapsal
What about guest bloggers from all around the world? The 7 Continents Blog Post! @MarionChapsal
Blog in Franglais? Will look forward to seeing where you put the "Focus" @spek2all
Speeches delivered in langs other than English/translated great speeches? @nhs999
How about something on comic timing? Just enjoying fellow Liverpudlian Ken Dodd on TV @LordRennard

So plenty of inspiration there to keep me blogging for a while.

I'll resist the temptation to blog in French, as suggested by Phil Waknell (24) and Marion Chapsal (25). But the question of how we ever manage to communicate effectively with people who speak different languages is an interesting one, especially for native speakers of English who tend to assume that everyone else speaks it too.

'Simplification' isn't always the answer

The first time I ever spoke at a conference where most of the audience were non-native speakers of English, I quickly became aware that they weren't understanding much of what I was saying. So I started to make it simpler - or so I thought.

In retrospect, I realised that my pitiful attempt to make things 'simpler' had led me to use more and more slang and colloquial expressions than I would ever normally do in an academic lecture. These may have made it easier for the native speakers of English to understand, but had made it far more more difficult for everyone else.

Translate jokes or tell the audience to laugh?

A former colleague of mine, who was a fluent speaker and teacher of Russian, used to be hired to do simultaneous translation for visitors from the (then) Soviet Union at major civic events. One of his problems was that the speeches by 'locals' often included jokes that he found quite impossible to translate.

His solution was to say in Russian something along the lines of "he's just told a joke that I can't translate into Russian, so you had all better start laughing - NOW" - which apparently worked well enough for the locals to think that their guests had both understood and appreciated the joke they'd just heard.

What did they really mean?

I once worked with a graduate student, whose bilingual abilities in English and Japanese enabled her to earn fees that more than paid for her higher education. On one occasion when she got back from a high level business meeting where she'd been doing simultaneous translation from Japanese for her British clients, I asked her how it had gone.

"OK as far as it went - but I do think that they should pay me for an extra hour afterwards to tell them what I think they really meant."

Does it matter?

With so much hanging on recent meetings between Euro-zone leaders, not to mention other important 'conversations' taking place elsewhere in our ever more 'globalized' world, a question that comes to mind is: how much should we worry about our reliance on simultaneous translation and/or the pretence that everyone speaks or understands English as well as we do?

Baby talk on BBC daytime television?

2011-11-18T11:18:00.007Z

As our dog likes watching television (day and night), she sometimes introduces me to the wonders of daytime TV.

In one of these shows - BBC's Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is - the random intonation of the unseen presenter's voice struck me as being bizarre enough to be worth a quick trawl through YouTube for a specimen:

My researches also led to a TV Guide, where the first comment on the show was headed 'Rubbish voice over'. Others included:

Still same rubbish, inane voice-over on this new series.
Childish voice over.
Can anyone do anything about the patronising and childish commentary?
An interesting programme which is spoiled each day by the childish voice over and empty nicknames.

So I wasn't alone in thinking that there was something odd about the commentary. Nor was I altogether surprised that some were describing the stresses on random words and intonational shifts up and down as 'childish'.

But I'm not completely convinced that it's quite the same as 'baby talk' or 'motherese' (HERE), which is supposed to help infants in language acquisition. That presumably involves exaggerating stress and intonation in ways that are relevant to the context and the particular words being used - which is not, as far as I can hear, the case with the voiceover in this show.

The only possible explanation I've been able to come up with is that he has perhaps been coached by the same person as Robert Peston and Rory Bremner:

Sepp Blatter lands on a racist snake

2011-11-17T10:50:00.005Z

In previous posts on the snakes & ladders theory of political communication (e.g. HERE and HERE), I've made the point that interviews (unlike speeches) hardly ever generate anything but bad news for politicians.

Strictly speaking, FIFA boss Sepp Blatter may not be a politician, but his ill-chosen words about racism in football are a classic example of the way in which a few seconds from a ten minute interview (which, if you can bear it, you can watch in full HERE) can land anyone on a snake that becomes damaging headline news.

Nor, of course, is it the first time that this master of the gaffe has made a fool of himself in front of a mass audience. I still think that the way in which, having appointed himself to present the World Cup to the winners in South Africa, he pushed President Zuma out of the way should have been grounds for his instant dismissal (below - and for more on which see HERE).

But he's still there eighteen months later and is, I fear, likely to remain as irremovable as ever...

Rick Perry and the Spanish Inquisition

2011-11-15T10:23:00.006Z

Last week, I was so busy preparing a keynote address for the annual conference of the UK & Ireland Toastmasters that I missed this spectacular failure to remember a third item in a list.

There are quite a lot of posts on this blog showing speakers making rather more effective use of three-part lists than Mr Perry, as well as a brief summary of the late Gail Jefferson's work on their recurrence in everyday conversation Why lists of three: mystery, magic or reason?

The above clip also reminded me that classic comedy shows have also sometimes played on a speaker's failure to remember all the items in a list, as in this excerpt from the Spanish Inquisition sketch in Monty Python's Flying Circus - where all goes well until Michael Palin makes the mistake of trying to add a fourth item:

Presentation tip: beware of flip charts on wheels

2011-11-14T17:46:00.015Z

In previous posts (and books), I've written favourably about writing on blackboards and flip charts (e.g. HERE + links).

But on Saturday, in the middle of a lecture to 200+ people, I suddenly realised that there was a rather important point that I'd failed to mention, namely: if the flip chart has wheels, make sure you LOCK THEM before trying to write anything on it.

Disaster averted

As the chart began falling backwards, the screen (on which I was about to show video clips on which the rest of my lecture depended) started to follow suit. Total disaster was only kept at bay by the weight of the curtain behind the stage and the quick reflexes of one of the organisers, who pushed the flip chart back on to the stage and locked its wheels.

A stunt worth repeating?

The huge amounts of laughter prompted by its sudden reappearance have now raised the question of whether such a stunt might be worth developing (and rehearsing) for use on another occasion?

I'm pretty sure that my blood pressure isn't up to risking it again - but, if anyone else would like to try it for themselves, I'd be delighted to hear whether it achieves a similarly positive impact.

Murdoch, the Mafia and the manufacture of a misleading soundbite

2011-11-10T20:43:00.010Z

There were two reasons why I was amazed to see the above highly edited clip being played on ITN's News at Ten this evening.

One was that ITN had cut out - without any mention of the fact that they had done so - two whole minutes of what had happened between Tom Watson's first and last question in this particular sequence.

The other was that, within seconds of the exchange, Twitter had been alive with news that this would be the sound bite from the 2.5 hours interrogation of James Murdoch by the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport select committee.

And so indeed it turned out to be.

But, for the benefit of those who only saw ITN's News at Ten (and/or anyone else who hadn't been following the whole story during the day), shouldn't there have been at least some indication that the sequence portrayed did not take place in quite the way they were making out?

You can compare ITN's version (above) with the full sequence (below) - in which the 'second' question from Tom Watson comes almost two minutes after the first one:

Communicator of the Year acceptance speech: Hitchcock or Hogan?

2011-11-09T17:35:00.007Z

At first I thought that the way to solve a problem that's been haunting me in the days before receiving the 'Communicator of the Year, 2011' award from Toastmasters International (UK & Ireland) on Saturday would be to emulate the model brevity of Alfred Hitchcock's two-word Oscar acceptance speech in 1967: "Thank you".

However, as I'll be using video clips in my lecture, an alternative would be to add this one from Paul Hogan's advice to Oscar winners on the "three Gs" - which, as the conference is taking place in Glasgow, might just do the job...

P.S. Problem solved

Thanks to a comment on the previous post from Julien, to whom many thanks, the solution is now obvious: "I think you should do a Keira Knightley but with PowerPoint slides showing (with bullet points) exactly who you're thanking and their relationship to you in a series of hard-to-read-on-screen diagrams."

Toastmasters International UK & Ireland: Communicator of the Year, 2011

2011-11-07T09:36:00.011Z

A few months ago, I accepted an invitation to do a keynote lecture at the Toastmasters International conference in Glasgow this coming weekend.

Then I discovered that they had a surprise in store and were going to elevate me to Communicator of the Year, 2011 - "awarded by Toastmasters to individuals who have either helped promote public speaking/leadership or helped to develop understanding of the speaking and leadership worlds."

Speechlessness

To say that I was surprised to the point of speechlessness would be an understatement. But, having just posted a clip of Lyndon Johnson saying "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president", I'm pleased to say "I did not seek, but gratefully accept the nomination of Toastmasters for this award."

When writing hits the mark

From my point of view, what's particularly gratifying is that the award is apparently in recognition of the fact that quite a lot of members of Toastmasters have found my books on speech-making and presentation quite helpful.

As I've said to some who've written positively about them in the past, without such unsolicited comments, authors never quite know whether what they've written has hit the mark(s) they was aiming for. So to receive an award like this comes as both a welcome bonus and as an honour - for which I'm as surprised as I am grateful.

Downsides

The only trouble is that two sources of stress will now be haunting me for the rest of the week.

One is that the audience at the conference lecture on Saturday will no doubt be checking to see if my performance comes anywhere near to matching up to the title Communicator of the Year, 2011.

The other is that I might have to give a Toastmasters' equivalent of an Oscar acceptance speech - which, depending on how many people I decide to thank and whether or not I break down in tears, could take up longer than my allotted time...

LBJ elected on this day in 1964: underrated president & underrated speaker

2011-11-03T12:40:00.010Z

Today is the anniversary of Lyndon B Johnson's victory over Barry Goldwater in the US presidential election of 1964.

Although presidents Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and Obama have all been recognised as great communicators, LBJ was no mean performer either. I hadn't realised this until seeing a clip shown by David Murray, editor of Vital Speeches of The Day, in his presentation at this year's annual conference of the UK Speechwriters' Guild.

I haven't been able to find the actual one he showed on YouTube, but the ones above and below are both historically interesting and well worth watching.

Had LBJ not become bogged down in the Vietnam war, his domestic political achievements, especially on civil rights, would have arguably earned him a place among the greatest of all American presidents. And, although he may not have been in the same league as Reagan or Obama in the oratory stakes, he was better at it than most.

TV talk about prices: "£499" = a lot, "4-9-9" = a little

2011-10-31T17:28:00.013Z

Not long after starting this blog, I had a slight moan about the way in which more and more TV advertisements were referring to prices in a way that bears little or no relationship to the way we talk about prices in everyday conversation (for more on which HERE):

"Commercials are telling us that an armchair priced at two hundred and ninety nine pounds costs 'two-nine-nine' and that a three-piece suite priced at four hundred and ninety nine pounds can be ours for 'four-nine-nine'. "

At the time, I suggested that there were two reasons why they were doing it:

"One is that it avoids having to mention high-sounding numbers like 'ninety' or 'a hundred'. The other is that these shorthand digital options save on costly air time: there are only three syllables in 'four-nine-nine' compared with eight syllables in 'four hundred and ninety nine pounds', which takes more than twice as long to say."

Three years later, this peculiar way of talking about prices is not only still on our screens, but the first of these reasons is arguably becoming rather more explicit. For example, in the above ad from Currys and PC World, we're told that we get "four hundred pounds off" for a first product that only costs "four-nine-nine", while the next one is "only five-nine-nine" or "four hundred pounds off".

In other words, the full (normal conversational) form is used to emphasise what a lot you "get off", whereas the digital (odd-sounding form) is used to emphasise how little the actual price is.

I can see how the ad agencies have managed to persuade their clients of the logic behind this bizarre usage, but very much doubt whether they have much in the way of hard evidence that it has the desired impact on TV viewers (for more on which, see HERE).

Did Mr Lickley pause for longer than usual at this particular point in the Tabak trial?

2011-10-25T16:27:00.005+01:00

Reports of the prosecution's closing statement to the jury at the trial of Vincent Tabak on the BBC and Sky News websites, have reminded me of what got me interested in studying rhetoric and persuasive language in in the first place.

Both websites cited, presumably verbatim, a contrast, the second part of which is a three-part list from the speech by prosecution barrister Mr Lickley:

"Vincent Tabak is very clever, he is intelligent.
"There is another side to Vincent Tabak. He is dishonest, deceitful and he is a liar."

In response to such rhetoric in a political speech, an audience might well have responded with applause. But in studying courtroom language, there was a methodological problem, summarised in an earlier post on the subject as follows:

'We had plenty of tapes of court hearings, but the absence of any audible responses from jurors during the proceedings meant there was no way of knowing which parts of what was being said were having a positive impact on the audience that really matters.

'The reason why applause in political speeches seemed a promising place to start was because it provides instant and unambiguous evidence that listeners are (a) awake and paying close attention and (b) approve strongly enough of what’s just been said to show their approval of it (by clapping hands, cheering, etc.)' - for more on which, see HERE.

Tapes of court hearings?

Earlier this year, in a blog on Televising the Supreme Court: one small step towards a giant leap, I made the point that the original reasons for banning cameras and television from our courts had disappeared long before Paul Drew and I wrote Order in Court: the Organization of Verbal Interaction in Judicial Settings (Macmillan Press, 1978). Yet the best data we could get from courts in the UK had to come from observations and transcripts - though. ironically, we never had any trouble copying audio-tapes of American trials from colleagues in the USA.

More than 30 years later, the same constraint still applies, so that anyone anyone else foolish enough to take a technical interest in the detailed workings of courtroom language will still have to make do without access to the raw material of live recordings. Meanwhile, Sky News (perhaps from rather dubious financial motives) has been doing its best to break through the barriers (e.g. HERE, not to mention its recent coverage of the trial of Michael Jackson's doctor).

The core methodological frustration is still with us

As I was still working at the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies after writing Our Masters' Voices in 1984, people used to ask, quite rightly, if the findings had any implications for speeches made to jurors in courts - and I'd very much like to have been in a position to give them an empirically grounded answer.

As far as we could tell from the American tapes to which we had access, exactly the same rhetorical techniques were being used in prosecution and defence statements to juries. But, at the points where applause would have occurred in a political speech, counsel were tending to pause for longer than usual - as if they were allowing the jurors time to engage in 'mental applause' and approval for the point they had just made.

On the basis of trials I've observed in English courts, I'd say that much the same seems to happen here too. But, so long as researchers aren't allowed access to actual recordings, it's impossible to check this against hard evidence.

My guess would be that the prosecutor in the Tabak trial at Bristol Crown Court probably did pause for longer than usual after making the point that was quoted on the BBC and Sky News websites earlier today. But, without being able to listen to actual recordings, we shall never know...

Professional broadcasters should beware of saying "um" and "er"

2011-10-25T10:54:00.020+01:00

The previous post on a famous broadcaster who speaks more effectively on television and radio than when he's lecturing (Melvyn Bragg) reminded me that there are also some professional broadcasters who punctuate their reports and interviews with rather more "ums" and "ers" than they should.

Someone I've noticed doing this is Adam Boulton, political editor of Sky News. On turning to YouTube for possible examples, even I was surprised that I had to look no further than the very first clip I came across (above), in which you'll hear 37 "ums" and "ers" in 150 seconds - at a rate of about one every 4 seconds.

SOUNDS OF SILENCE: Ums and Ers
• Needless noises?
A normal feature of conversational speech is the way we punctuate much of what we say with ums and ers. But, for audiences trying to listen to a speech (or broadcast) this can become a major source of irritation, because presenters who retain their normal conversational umming/erring rate come across as hesitant, lacking in confidence, uncertain of their material and badly prepared.

• Don’t worry – I’ve started
In conversation, one of the commonest places for ums and ers is right at the start of a new speaker’s turn, where we use them to avoid what might otherwise be heard as a potentially embarrassing silence - by indicating: "I'm not being impolite or disagreeable but am about to respond any second now". But some public speakers (and broadcasters) make a habit of starting almost every new sentence with an um or an er, of which they’re typically completely unaware of until they hear themselves on tape - when most are appalled by the negative impact they must have had on their audience.

• Hold on – I haven’t finished yet

Another place where we often um or er in conversation is when we suddenly find ourselves stuck for a word or name we need to be able to carry on. We know that, if we simply stay silent while searching for the word, someone else will use the pause as a chance for them to speak, thereby preventing us from finishing whatever it was we were about to say. So saying um or er is a simple and effective device for letting everyone know that you haven’t finished yet and that it’s still your turn.

• When pause-avoidance loses its point
If the primary functions of ums and ers in conversation are to avoid silences and reduce the chances of being interrupted, they lose their point in presentations and broadcasts. After all, presenters are not competing to hold the floor in the same was as in everyday conversation and, once in full flow, they certainly don't need to keep reminding us that they've just started a new sentence. As a result, umming/erring rates that would be perfectly normal and hardly noticed in everyday conversation stand out as needless distractions when heard from the mouths of presenters.

In defence of Mr Boulton?

In the particular clip above, it could be argued that Adam Boulton's umming/erring reflects his uncertainty in the face of two things that are new to him: (1) the gadget he's showing to the interviewer (and us) and (2) giving a televised
Tomorrow's World style demonstration that's far removed from his natural habitat of political interviewing and reporting.

But the reason I started looking for a video clip of him in the first place was that I'd often noticed (and been surprised by) the frequency of his umming and erring in his regular contributions on Sky News.
Nor, would it appear, am I alone in having done so - as his was one of the names mentioned on Twitter yesterday after I'd invited people to guess the identity of the umming/erring television news presenter about whom I was planning a blog.

P.S. BBC policy on ums & ers?
Long ago, I seem to remember being told that BBC Radio's policy towards editing out ums and
ers had changed over the years and I'd be curious to hear confirmation that this was indeed so (or not). Does anyone know whether that there was a time when all ums and ers were edited out of recorded BBC interviews with inexperienced interviewees as a matter of course, followed by a period when all of them were left in (to ensure greater 'authenticity') and eventually ending up with a 50:50 compromise in which some, but not all, were deleted? Or am I just dreaming?

Effective broadcasters aren't always effective public speakers: the case of Melvyn Bragg

2011-10-21T10:25:00.015+01:00

In his autobiography, the late Professor A.J. Ayer, noted that he'd been surprised to discover, when appearing long ago on BBC Radio's The Brains Trust, that broadcasting was very different from lecturing - in that it worked perfectly well for him and the other participants to speak at their normal conversational speed.

Last night, on the way out of Wells Cathedral after a lecture by Melvyn Bragg, I overheard a conversation between two other members of the audience that went as follows:

A: "There was too much to be able to take in."

B: "And he kept rambling off the subject with too many digressions."

I resisted the temptation to intervene with the strangers to express my complete agreement that he had indeed tried to cover far too much ground in a lecture that was also sadly lacking in structure and direction.

To these complaints, I would have added: "He also spoke far too quickly for a lecture, and especially one that went on for far too long" (i.e. 90 minutes).

Lecturing v. broadcasting

Bragg is, of course, a very experienced award-winning broadcaster - whose South Bank Show was seen as so crucial to London Weekend Television's franchise bid (after the 1990 Broadcasting Act) that he was one of a small group of staff who were paid multi-million pound 'golden handcuffs' to keep them with the company during and after the bid.

But, unlike Professor Ayer, he doesn't seem to have realised that lecturing calls for a rather different pace than broadcasting - not least because listeners are up against problem of trying to stay awake and pay attention to a far longer stream of talk than is ever the case in any of his television or radio programmes (or in everyday conversation, where the average length of turns at talk is about 8 seconds).

For radio listeners, eavesdropping on conversations, even intellectual ones like those on Bragg's In Our Time on BBC Radio 4, is easy enough. But he needs to learn that pausing much more frequently, and for much longer than you would ever do in a conversation (or on radio), is crucial to effective public speaking - and that includes lecturing.

In conversation, native speakers of English talk at a rate of about 180 words per minute, whereas the speed of effective public speakers is 120 words per minute (for more on which, see Lend Me Your Ears).

In this clip from a lecture by Melvyn Bragg marking Darwin's bicentenary at the Natural History Museum (where the acoustics sound remarkably similar to Wells Cathedral), the pauses are so infrequent and so short that his rate of delivery is just over 161 words per minute - i.e. much closer to conversational/broadcasting speeds than to the ideal for effective public speaking (longer version of video HERE):

Melvyn Bragg in his more natural broadcasting habitat

For comparative purposes, here's a clip of the conversational Melvyn Bragg interviewing Gore Vidal on the South Bank Show:

Gaddafi as orator: a life in quotes - with thanks to Al Jazeera

2011-10-20T15:06:00.011+01:00

Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, I've been a regular visitor to the AlJazeera website to keep up with the latest news.

Today, they've posted a collection of quotations from Gaddafi which make fascinating reading - not just in themselves, but because most of them are even more bizarre than any of the entries to the 'doomed dictators speechwriting competition' earlier this year.

Al Jazeera's post on Gaddafi's oratory:

As soon as Muammar Gaddafi seized power in Libya in 1969, at the age of 27, he launched into a perplexing and controversial career as a speech-maker that now spans more than 40 decades. In scattershot diatribes that at times stretched to several hours, Gaddafi astounded audience at Libya and abroad.

Famously dubbed the "mad dog of the Middle East" by Ronald Reagan, the former president of the US, Gaddafi did little to dispel that nickname in his wild orations and writings. In 1975, he outlined his political philosophy in "The Green Book" which carried the subtitle, ""The Solution to the Problems of Democracy; The Social Basis to the Third Universal Theory."

No matter how he is remembered by history, Gaddafi’s legacy as an orator is assured. Here are some famous Gaddafi-isms from his nearly 42 years in power:

"I am an international leader, the dean of the Arab rulers, the king of kings of Africa and the imam of Muslims, and my international status does not allow me to descend to a lower level."
— Remarks to a crowd including King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and having his microphone cut on March 30, 2009, as quoted by The Scotsman in the article "Gaddafi walks out of summit after attack on Saudi king" by Salah Nasrawi.

"There is no state with a democracy except Libya on the whole planet."
— Spoken at a conference at Columbia University in New York City on March 23, 2008.

"I am convinced that the [Israel-Palestine] solution is to establish a democratic state for the Jews and the Palestinians, a state that will be called Palestine, Isratine, or whatever they want. This is the fundamental solution, or else the Jews will be annihilated in the future, because the Palestinians have [strategic] depth."
— Interview with Al Jazeera, March 27, 2007

"If a community of people wears white on a mournful occasion and another dresses in black, then one community would like white and dislike black and the other would like black and dislike white. Moreover, this attitude leaves a physical effect on the cells as well as on the genes in the body."
— Excerpt from "The Green Book" (1975)

"[Abraham] Lincoln was a man who created himself from nothing without any help from outside or other people. I followed his struggles. I see certain similarities between him and me."
— Pulbished in The Pittsburgh Press on August 3, 1986, in the article "Gadhafi, the man the world loves to hate" by Marie Colvin.

"Irrespective of the conflict with America, it is a human duty to show sympathy with the American people and be with them at these horrifying and awesome events which are bound to awaken human conscience. When I was five, my brother was shot by an Israeli soldier, since then I have been dedicated to uniting the Arab countries throughout the Middle East and retain a trade flow with the West."
— Reaction to the September 11, 2001, attacks as quoted by CBSNews.com on September 12, 2001.

"All right, then nobody can complain if we ask pregnant women to make parachute jumps."
— Defending his belief that women's "defects" meant that their place was in the home as quoted by TIME on July 23, 1975.

"Libya is an African country. May Allah help the Arabs and keep them away from us. We don't want anything to do with them. They did not fight with us against the Italians, and they did not fight with us against the Americans. They did not lift the sanctions and siege from us. On the contrary, they gloated at us, and benefited from our hardship…"
— Interview with Al Jazeera, March 27, 2007

"There is a conspiracy to control Libyan oil and to control Libyan land, to colonise Libya once again. This is impossible, impossible. We will fight until the last man and last woman to defend Libya from east to west, north to south."
— audio message broadcast on Al-Ouroba TV, a Syria-based satellite station, on August 25, as oppostion forces began as assault on Tripoli.

Related posts on speeches in Arabic:

A not very fantastic speech from Dr Fox

2011-10-19T14:13:00.006+01:00

Resignation speeches tend to be at their best when a cabinet minister has taken the initiative to resign, as in the cases of Sir Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson and Robin Cook.

So I wasn't expecting much from the statement by the departing Dr Fox in the House of Commons earlier today. Nor did we get very much.

Beforehand, journalists on Twitter were getting very excited:

"Liam Fox just entered commons after govt chief whip Patrick McLoughlin scanned chamber" @nicholaswatt

"Fox has arrived" @paulwaugh

"Fox arrives. Sits on back bench" @MichaelLCrick

During and after the speech, they weren't impressed:

"Astonishing stuff from Fox. Apparently doesn't realise he's done anything wrong. It's all the evil meeja out to get him, right?" @dlknowles

"Fox has the brass neck to blame the media for his downfall." @ayestotheright

"If it weren't for the media, Liam, you wouldn't have been found out. A bit rich to have a go at us now." @MASieghart

"Too much like an Oscar acceptance speech"

This tweet, from @AndrewSparrow of The Guardian, summed the whole thing up - and with a nice touch of irony...

More reactions:

Simon Hoggart: Liam Fox tiptoes round the notion that he did anything wrong (Guardian)
Andrew Grice: Fox faces second inquiry as he turns his fire on the media (Independent)

Two engaging women speakers from British politics - and two models for powerful women?

2011-10-15T11:25:00.040+01:00

During the Labour Party conference last month, I raised the question of whether some of the party's leading women, such as Yvette Cooper, Caroline Flint and Harriet Harman, are better speakers than the party's current generation of leading men.

Shirley Williams

On hearing the 81 year old Shirley Williams speaking at the Wells Literary Festival the other night - along the lines of the above from a similar speech she made at the Stratford-upon- Avon Literary Festival - I realised that there's nothing particularly new about effective women speakers holding their own with their male contemporaries and rising to the higher reaches of the Labour Party (and later, in her case, within the SDP and Liberal Democrats too).

Long before Williams and the three male members of the 'gang of four' had broken away from Labour to form the SDP, she had been a cabinet minister in the Wilson and Callaghan governments. And, from quite early in her political career, she was sometimes mentioned as a possible first woman Labour leader and even as a possible first ever woman prime minister.

Although these both eluded her, she's still not only a very engaging speaker, but also one who's retained an energy to rival many, if not most, speakers who are very much younger than she is. During her brief stay in Somerset this weekend, she was making speeches and taking questions from 1930-2130 on Friday night and from 0930-1130 and 1230-1400 on Saturday (i.e. for about 50% of the waking hours she was here).

As if that wasn't enough, she was planning to spend her train journey back to London reading a few more hundred pages of the health bill and its amendments in the current House of Lords debate in which she is playing a very active part.

Barbara Castle

Twenty years older than Shirley Williams was another leading figure in Harold Wilson's Labour government, the late Barbara Castle. I haven't been able to find any clips of her speeches on YouTube - where there seem to be more of Miranda Richardson playing her in the film Made in Dagenham than there are of the real Mrs Castle - but some of us are old enough to remember that she too was a much better than average public speaker.

Here's a typically assured performance from her in a TV interview from the early 1970s about the resignation of a defence minister and press intrusion in the private lives of public figures - a curiously topical coincidence to remind us that some issues are still making the headlines four decades later:

Castle, Williams and the Thatcher solution

In Our Masters' Voices and some of the blog posts below (especially HERE), I suggested that Margaret Thatcher had found a solution to the professional woman’s problem of being damned if they behave like a man and damned if they behave like a woman by being tough and decisive in her actions while being uncompromisingly female in her external appearance – and that this was summed up by the nickname the 'Iron Lady’, capturing as it does both 'strength' and 'femininity'.

In this respect, Barbara Castle, regarded in her day as being as tough, glamourous and well-dressed, came much closer to the Thatcher model for women politicians than Shirley Williams ever did.

The Williams alternative

At the time of writing Our Masters' Voices, I remember suggesting somewhere that Mrs Williams represented a rather different available role-model for women in politics than the one offered by Thatcher and Castle: the 'intellectual', ' blue-stockinged', 'untidy', 'verging on scruffy' stereotype of the female Oxbridge don (or Women's Institute lecturer).

As for whether she consciously developed such an image, there are at least two pieces of evidence that she is certainly aware of it in retrospect.

One is that she actually referred, without any prompting, to her erstwhile reputation for having untidy hair during the talk she gave on Friday night.

Clothes + fashion = frivolous waste of time peddled by supercilious saleswomen

The other evidence comes in the first chapter of her autobiography, Climbing the Bookshelves (of which I'm now the proud owner of a signed copy), where she reveals that she already had little or no interest in clothes and fashion by the time she was 10 years old. Comparing herself with her mother, she writes:

'... she did allow herself some moments of frivolity. She loved clothes and used to take me with her while she tried on the elegant polka-dotted silk dresses and emphatic hats of the 1930s. A new hat or pair of gloves could lift her spirit for days. It was a pleasure I did not share. After the first ten minutes of each encounter with a supercilious sales lady, I began to think about ponies and tricycles, and to resent the waste of my time. These early experiences immunised me against both shopping and fashion. For years I bought the first thing that looked even vaguely as if it might suit me, though often it didn't.'

Related posts

Imagery can take us to the frontiers of science - via scissors, generals and sentinels

2011-10-12T15:53:00.009+01:00

People sometimes tell me that it's all very well to bang on about the power of using imagery to get messages across (as in 'Painting Pictures with Words', Lend Me Your Ears, Ch. 7 and various other posts on this blog), but that it won't help much if you're speaking about technical subjects, let alone taking an audience to the frontiers of science.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as can be seen in this clip from a TED talk by Professor Peter Donnelly, FRS, telling us about "chemical scissors which cut DNA whenever they see particular patterns":

A few days ago BBC Radio 4's Material World (listen again HERE) included a discussion of the contribution made by Professor Ralph Steinman who died just before being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology. In this sequence, we're told that T cells act "as the generals of the army" and dendritic cells which "instruct T cells who to attack".

Interviewer Quentin Cooper picks up on "the generals in the army" analogy and suggests that dendritic cells are "almost like military intelligence". "Precisely", agrees the interviewee, before dubbing them as "sentinels for the immune system" and developing the point further...

50 years of Private Eye: a story of retail, rejection and recognition

2011-10-10T10:18:00.005+01:00

It's supposed to be a sure sign of growing older when you start thinking that police officers and doctors are getting younger. Another is when you realise that more and more significant anniversaries are taking place of events you think of as recent memories.

For me, the latest reminder of this is the news that it's 50 years since the fortnightly satirical magazine Private Eye was first published.

Not only do I remember it well, but I was also an early salesman and have been a subscriber and (very occasional) contributor ever since.

Retail

Selling the Eye outside university cafeterias was my first serious business venture. Lord Gnome had rightly seen students as a promising source of potential readers and had invited volunteers to join his sales force.

Once a fortnight, all I had to do was to go down to the station and collect my 6o copies of the latest edition, then priced at 1/6d (one shilling and sixpence, or 7.5 pence in new money) - for which I had to pay 1/- (one shilling, or 5 pence in new money) each, leaving a net profit of 30 shillings (£1.50 in new money) per fortnight.

These days, 75 pence a week may sound like a pittance. But when pubs sold a pint of beer for the equivalent of 7.5 pence, it was riches indeed.

Rejection

For years, I tried unsuccessfully to get Private Eye to publish my hilariously funny (?) cartoons, only to be bombarded with rejection slips suggesting that I should send them to Punch magazine (now coming up to the 10th anniversary of its demise in 2002).

I also rather regret that nothing I've written has ever made it into Pseuds' Corner, even though I know that such acclaim can have embarrassing consequences. Someone (and we haven't forgotten who you are) had successfully submitted a sentence from article about conversational turn-taking that one of my best friends had published in a learned journal.

When I told him that I was rather envious because nothing of mine had ever got into Pseuds' Corner, he warned of the dire consequences such recognition can have. It had been published a few days before he was due in Cambridge to serve as external examiner in a PhD viva. As he put it "they already think we're mad enough to be doing conversation analysis in the first place, without being able to rub it in by waving Private Eye at me before the meeting started."

Recognition

It wasn't until the mid-1980s that I finally managed to extract a cheque from Lord Gnome for a photograph that I'd taken of the village sign outside a village in Northamptonshire that bore the legend "Silverstone - please drive slowly."

Even then, it had seemed like another rejection for the many months it failed to appear in the I Spy feature, making me grumpier by the fortnight. Then, to give them their due, it turned out that they hadn't binned it after all, but had merely been waiting, with the journalistic flair we expect from Private Eye, to publish it the week before that year's British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

More recently, the Eye published another photograph I'd taken of a fly-posted planning notice from Mendip District Council - at a time when they were wasting unspecified amounts of council-tax payers' money on a campaign against fly-posting notices of forthcoming village events on 'items of street furniture', i.e. MDC jobsworthy jargon for telephone and electricity posts... (continued on p. 94).

Listen again: Lord Gnome aged 49 and 3 quarters - Michael Crick, BBC Radio 4 (8th October - for another 6 days).

The End of Summer - with thanks to Steve Jobs & Flipron

2011-10-07T11:16:00.011+01:00

At this time last year, I posted a video clip of audiences clapping out the conference season (HERE).

This year, I've produced a compilation of members of a conference audience listening in rapt attention (?) with musical backing from Flipron's The End of Summer (from their album Biscuits for Cerberus). Much admired for Jesse Budd's lyrics and Joe Atkinson's brilliance on the keyboards, this particular sequence neatly catches a suitable mood for marking the end of the party conference season.

And thanks to Steve Jobs - without whom...

When I bought my first computer in 1985, I came very close to buying an Apple Macintosh but chickened out and bought an Apricot (with two slots for 750K floppy disks).

About twenty years later, while staying with John Heritage in Los Angeles, I found myself being marched into the student shop at UCLA, where he made me buy my first MacBook.

Since then, I quickly upgraded to a MacBook Pro, have acquired a desktop MacPro and have been using an iPhone since the first week of its launch in the UK.

To expand on all the many virtues of being liberated from the familiar nightmares of using a Windows computer would be to risk a very long and boring blogpost. So suffice it to say that the incredible reliability and ease of using the iMovie program that's built into Macs has saved me thousands of hours in preparing demo clips both for lectures and courses and for posting as examples on this blog.

For example, preparing this particular movie - including retrieval of the music, selecting and editing the clips and aligning them with the backing - took less than half an hour.

And, as if that's not enough to be grateful to Steve Jobs for, he also stood out among CEOs as an extremely effective presenter from whom there was much that other business leaders could and should learn.

More from Steve Jobs:

Steve Jobs shows how to use an object as a visual aid (and how to speak about it)
Steve Jobs shows how to time the changing of slides (and how not to)
Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Address (9 million YouTube views at time of posting this + another million in the 24 hours since then)

More from Flipron:

Cameron's too good a speaker to be following Mrs Thatcher into the teleprompter trap

2011-10-06T16:51:00.011+01:00

A couple of years ago, I posted some video clips showing how Margaret Thatcher's speech-making became less effective when she stopped using hard copy scripts and started reading speeches from teleprompter screens (HERE).

A few months later, I realised that I'd been mistaken in thinking that David Cameron was having problems reading from screens - as it turned out that he wasn't using an Autocue or any other form of teleprompter at that time (HERE).

Cameron follows Thatcher down the same hill

But yesterday Mr Cameron had not only taken to using a teleprompter for his leader's speech, but was also encountering the same kinds of difficulties that diminished Mrs Thatcher's effectiveness all those years ago.

When using a script on a lectern, she would return her eyes to the text, clear her throat and close her mouth after making an applaudable point, leaving no one in any doubt that the time had come for them to get their hands apart. But, when reading from teleprompter screens, her head stayed up gazing into space, with the result that her applause rate fell dramatically (video examples HERE)

And there were some rather long sections in Mr Cameron's speech yesterday where the lack of applause was noticeably absent

Here you can see see two examples of him falling into the same trap as Mrs Thatcher . In both cases, he sets up what's coming as an applaudable point. But in both cases, nothing happens for so long (2-3 seconds) that he's already carried on again by the time it finally does - at which point he has to break off.

Also in both cases he seems to acknowledge the glitch with a slight nod, indicating, perhaps: "yes, it is your turn and you should jolly well have started a bit sooner than that"?.

Given that Cameron is more effective than most of his contemporaries at speaking from scripts on a lectern, I'd advise him to ditch the teleprompter forthwith.

Or, if his aides have cooked up some reason that's convinced him it's a good idea, they should also convince him that he's going to need a lot more practice if he's to get anywhere near his effectiveness with old-fashioned scripts (or, for that matter, with no script at all, as in the 10 minute speech that clinched the leadership for him at the beauty parade in 2005).

Swim or sink with the president of the European Commission

2011-10-04T10:20:00.007+01:00

Preparing for speechwriting course in Brussels this week, I thought it would be nice to include an example of a 'local' using some of the main rhetorical techniques in one of my demo tapes.

Such are the wonders of YouTube that it took less than a minute to find this little gem from the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, which had been singled out for replaying in a news report on his 'state of the union' speech:

REPORTER: He said Europe has to move forward towards matching its monetary union with a real economic union among its member states:

PUZZLE: This is Europe's moment of truth.

SOLUTION: Europe must show that its more than 37 different national solutions.

CONTRAST (with swimming metaphor + alliteration): We either swim together or sink separately.

Not surprisingly, this selection of key rhetorical techniques worked well enough for it to be singled out by the media as a sound bite - but it didn't impress everyone.

Guess who doesn't want to be seen clapping

British readers may be interested to see that, of the five MEPs shown just before Mr Barroso starts speaking, the only one who doesn't join in with the applause is none other than Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP (the UK Independence Party).

Whether or not you're one of his supporters or opponents, it has to be admitted that his behaviour here is admirably consistent with his long-standing antipathy towards the EU.

Osborne finds the Tories more enthusiastic about the coalition than they were a year ago

2011-10-03T15:02:00.019+01:00

A recurring observation on this blog during last year's party conference season was that audiences at the Liberal Democrat and Conservative party conferences were rather lukewarm about the coalition government they had just formed (see below). This was indicated by the fact that applause for mentions of it tended to be either delayed or failed to reach the 'normal' 8 seconds burst (or both) - e.g. HERE and HERE.

But in George Osborne's speech earlier today, there was evidence of a greater willingness among Conservative party activists to show their approval of the coalition than they were at this time a year ago.

When the Chancellor commended the Liberal Democrats for "working as a coalition together in the national interest" (about 30 seconds into the above clip) the audience not only started clapping more or less straight away, but they also managed to keep it going for a healthy 10 seconds.

P.S. Blimey!

Since posting the above, I've just discovered that the whole speech can now be embedded from the BBC website - so serious anoraks can now watch it from beginning to end:

Conference season 2011 blogging update:

Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition
Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?
Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses
A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions
Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news
Andrew Neil plays snakes & ladders with Ed Balls before picking up a scalpel
Stand-up comedy from Ed Miliband
Why did some Labour members boo & clap when Miliband mentioned tony Blair?
Did the BBC change its mind on publicising the snake Miliband landed on yesterday?
Are Labour's leading women better speakers than Labour's leading men?
The snake (interview) that did for Nixon's reputation & the ladder (speech) that had saved it
Last year's conference season posts:
Delayed applause at a key point in Nick Clegg's conference speech
Party conference season prize competition
Delayed applause in Vince Cable's speech (at same point as in Clegg's)
More lessons from Vince Cable's speech
Labour Party leaders' acceptance speeches" Neil Kinnock, 1983; Ed Miliband, 2010
Ed Miliband "gets it" in his bid to bond with the brethren
Did David Miliband lose because he was too old and experienced?
Delayed applause for Ed Miliband's claims on the 'centre ground'
'Clap on the name': a practical tip for Ed Miliband and/or his speechwriters
Delayed applause for William Hague's boast about being in government
What a peculiar Tory backdrop, Part 2: What do the flags mean?
Tories 'Bomb Middle England' - by Banksy
Delayed applause, poor speech writing & delivery strike again in Osborne's speech
Delayed applause for Cameron's government - from the Conservatives!
BIG SOCIETY: little applause
Conference season competition results

The snake (interview) that did for Nixon's reputation and the ladder (speech) that had saved it

2011-10-02T11:37:00.016+01:00

The Frost-Nixon interview as the ultimate snake

Was it, I wonder, pure coincidence that BBC2's schedule last night included some archive footage of the original Frost-Nixon interview (including the above), followed by the film version of the events surrounding and leading up to it?

After all, the party conference season, with its mix of extended interviews with politicians, very short clips from their speeches and much longer clips from media commentators telling us what they're talking about, has yet to grind to a close.

From my point of view, having started the season by asking why our politicians are so willing to play snakes and ladders under media rules that give them little chance of landing on anything but a snake (HERE), the chance to see the Frost-Nixon film could hardly have come at a more appropriate time.

Here was a disgraced American president who thought himself smart enough to run rings around a talk-show host and salvage his reputation - only to be lured into landing on about as damaging a snake as David Frost and his media colleagues could ever have dreamt of.

The Checkers speech as the ladder that saved his career

A quarter of a century earlier, claims that vice-presidential candidate Nixon might have misappropriated campaign funds almost forced his withdrawal as President Eisenhower's running mate.

What saved him was not an interview, but the carefully crafted 'Checkers speech' (still ranked as the 6th greatest political speech on the American Rhetoric website).

Interestingly, both the name it became known by and much of its powerful impact derived from a simple anecdote about his children and a little cocker spaniel dog.

I think our current politicians could do worse than to watch both - and reflect on what a single interview and a single speech did for Nixon's political reputation.

Were they to do so, they might think again about what, if anything, they are gaining from their tacit collusion with broadcasters about the relative merits of interviews and speeches as alternative ways of communicating their messages (and conveying positive/negative images of themselves) to a wider public.

(You may have to put up with a 15 seconds commercial before this starts).

Are Labour's leading women better speakers than Labour's leading men?

2011-09-30T14:51:00.012+01:00

I know that some of my Twitter friends, like @MarionChapsal of Geronimo Coaching, have an interest in collecting examples of powerful women speakers and leaders.

Having kept an eye out on both male and female speakers at this week's Labour Party conference, I thought that they and other readers might like to see three good efforts from women who spoke there.

For what it's worth, my general impression is that some of the party's leading women are way ahead of their male brethren when it comes to effective public speaking.

Why?

Is this, I wonder, because oratory is a dying art among males in a party that has seen former trades unionists, trained at the factory gates, give way to a new class of of Oxbridge educated young men trained as backroom boys for older MPs (and with little or no experience of having done anything much outside professional politics)?

Or is it simply that, even in a party so lacking in charismatic male speakers, women still have to be far better than average to get noticed and rise within the party?

YVETTE COOPER, Shadow Home Secretary:

CAROLINE FLINT, Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government:

<iframe width="400" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Tpg4rZRGdgg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>

HARRIET HARMAN, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party:

Postscript
On reflection, and at the risk of offending Msses (if that's the plural of 'Ms') Cooper, Flint and Harman, it occurs to me that they arguably all have something in common with Margaret Thatcher when it comes to solving the problem of becoming a 'charismatic woman' (see HERE). That particular post concluded as follows:

'... one of Mrs Thatcher's major long term achievements may turn out to have been the undermining of age-old assumptions of the sort contained in Quintillian's observation that the perfect orator cannot exist ‘unless as a good man'. And, by finding a workable solution to the problem of being damned for being like a man and damned for not being like a man, her combination of uncompromising femininity with equally uncompromising words and deeds may have laid the foundations for a new tradition within which women politicians of the future will be able to operate' (derived from Our Masters' Voices, 1984, pp.111-121).

Conference season 2011 blogging update:
Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition
Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?
Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses
A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions
Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news
Andrew Neil plays snakes & ladders with Ed Balls before picking up a scalpel
Stand-up comedy from Ed Miliband
Why did some Labour members boo & clap when Miliband mentioned tony Blair?
Did the BBC change its mind on publicising the snake Miliband landed on yesterday?

Did the BBC change its mind on publicising the snake Miliband landed on yesterday?

2011-09-30T11:27:00.014+01:00

If this blog's main theme during last year's party conference season was the way in which audiences failed to applaud things that they should have applauded, this year's is turning out to be the snakes and ladders theory of political communication - which proposes that, for politicians, speeches work like ladders (by bringing them good news), whereas interviews work like snakes (by bringing them bad news).

Ed Miliband's memory lapse 'exposed' in a BBC interview

As I was driving for about six hours yesterday, I spent much more time listening to the radio than tracking the blogging and tweeting from the last vestiges of the Labour Party conference.

But the car radio obliged - as an example of how a gaffe in an interview can generate embarrassing news for a politician, they don't get much better than Ed Miliband's failure to name one of his party's candidates in the campaign for the Labour's Scottish leader - which was headlined on the early evening news programmes from BBC Radio 4.

By the time I got home, the internet was awash with the news. By 9.17 p.m., Mark Pack had embedded the original clip from the BBC website on the Liberal Denocrat Voice blog (HERE).

A change of heart from the BBC?

But when I tried to do the same earlier this morning, I was thwarted.

Yes, you can still watch the clip on the BBC website, but you can no longer access the code needed to embed it on your own blog or website - which is why I've had to 'make do' with embedding the version posted on YouTube by Guido Fawkes (that's already been seen by about 5,500 viewers).

When it first became possible to embed clips from the BBC website, I welcomed it (HERE). Since then, however, how they decide which ones are allowed to reach a wider audience (by giving access to the embedding code) has remained a complete mystery.

Today it's become be even more mysterious than I thought. After all, why, having supplied the code for embedding this particular clip last night, has the BBC withdrawn access to it this morning?

If they've done it in response to complaints from the Labour Party (who else would want to restrict its accessibility to a wider audience) we could be witnessing an even more worrying form of collusion between broadcasters and politicians than I suggested we're already up against in Politicians & broadcasters: collaboration or capitulation?

Why did Labour members boo and clap when Miliband mentioned Tony Blair?

2011-09-28T11:31:00.007+01:00

News last month that a Libyan crowd had been booing on hearing the name 'Gaddafi' prompted me to note that Arabic speakers apparently boo at names too.

Little did I think that we'd soon be hearing some members of a Labour Party conference audience booing while others clapped on hearing the name 'Tony Blair'.

Not content with announcing "I am not Tony Blair", Ed Miliband went on to make another rather obvious point: "I am not Gordon Brown either" (no response).

Then, with what struck me as an air of frustration and perhaps even desperation, he asserted "I am my own man and I'm going to do things in my own way" - 16 seconds of applause (i.e. twice as much as a normal burst).

Who writes stuff like this I do not know. Whether it was Miliband or his speechwriters, one has to ask whether it really didn't occur to any of them that the lines might just possibly (or should that be 'certainly') be singled out and played at the top of BBC Television's Ten o'clock News (as indeed they were) - or that, barely half-hour later, Sadiq Khan, the M.P. who led Ed Miliband's leadership campaign would be reminding us of these very same words (with apparent pride) in an interview with Kirsty Wark on BBC2's Newnight.

What did the booing and clapping mean?

Having watched the above clip quite a few times, I'm still fascinated by the ambiguity of these simultaneously negative and positive audience responses.

Were those who booed indicating that they were sorry to hear that Ed Miliband is not Tony Blair, or that they were pleased to hear him distancing himself from Tony Blair?

Were those who applauded indicating that they were pleased to hear that Miliband is not Blair, or that they were still fans of Blair?

Whatever the answer, an obvious alternative interpretation was to treat it as evidence of division in the party about its past, present and future - which, as a communications strategy, is about as effective as bowling a full toss for the media to hit for six.

Hunt the split

Although British broadcasters may have largely lost interest in showing clips from speeches during news programmes (see the last few posts), they won't miss the possibility of reporting splits in a party if there's so much as a hint of division. That, after all, has been the leitmotif of media coverage of politics for decades.

So what better way to do it than to focus on Mr Miliband's determination to distance himself from his two immediate predecessors, with the added bonus of showing footage of party members booing and applauding the name of the most successful leader they've ever had.

Can Labour afford to back the Ed Milibandwagon?

On asking this question during the Labour leadership campaign last year, I attracted a bit of flak for daring to suggest that Ed Miliband might be too young to remember what had actually happened to his party during its 18 years of decline and recovery between 1979 and 1997 (HERE).

His recurrent rubbishing of New Labour may have helped him to win that particular campaign.

If this speech is anything to go by, he still seems to think there's mileage to be had from continuing to bite the hands that fed him the promotions without which he would never have become a credible leadership candidate in the first place.

But for me, his speech was a reminder of what I'd written about him more than a year ago: maybe he really is too young to know what he's talking about.

If he isn't, I'm left with little or no idea about what he really stands for or what he's trying to tell us about the direction in which he plans to take his party.

Conference season 2011 blogging update:

Stand-up comedy from Ed Miliband

2011-09-27T16:57:00.007+01:00

Is it a good idea for political leaders to have a go at doing stand-up comedy?

As regular readers will know from a post at the start of the conference season, I'm all in favour of viewers being allowed to hear more from the horses' mouths, so that they can draw their own conclusions about what they think of competing politicians - without having to depend ever more heavily on interpretations from media reporters and commentators.

But, although I do have a few thoughts about the above sequence from the opening of Ed Miliband's leader's speech at the Labour Party conference a few hours ago, I'm more than happy to let you reach your own judgements about it...

Conference season 2011 blogging update:

Andrew Neil plays snakes & ladders with Ed Balls before picking up a scalpel

2011-09-27T13:42:00.020+01:00

Last night, after watching The Daily Politics show on BBC2, I posted a couple of tweets on Twitter that would hardly have come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog:

"Just watched @afneil 'review' of #Lab11 - i.e. pitifully short extracts from speeches + long/boring interviews."
"If I were Ed Balls, I'd think twice about playing such a long game of snakes & ladders with @afneil"

The tweets, of course, reflect my concern about the way in which British politicians seem to have conceded control of political communication in the UK to the broadcasting media - by going along with the latter's preference for devoting more and more airtime to interviews and less and less to excerpts from speeches, even though interviews seldom deliver anything other than bad news and negative impressions of politicians (for reasons explained in more detail HERE).

A new weapon: media autopsies of media interviews

The diversification of communication in the digital age means that celebrity media interviewers can now carry out their own post-mortems on their own interviews to search out any errors an interviewee (or should that be 'victim') might have made while walking so obligingly along the tightrope prepared for them by the all-powerful broadcasters.

If it then turns out that the politician did indeed land on a snake in the just-completed game of snakes and ladders, the interviewer can start tweeting and blogging about it to their heart's content.

Balls goes under the reporter's knife

And so it was, after the interview was over, out came the pathologist's report, starting as follows (full version HERE):

"I interviewed Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls on the Daily Politics Conference Special on Monday, live from Liverpool, the moment he'd finished speaking to the Labour conference.

"In the course of our usual robust exchange, which we both enjoy, he made a couple of claims that I knew I would have to investigate more thoroughly. And I have! ..." (continued: HERE).

A clearer dividing line between comment and reportage?

I concluded Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation? by explaining why I think the changes that have been taking place matter:

'..whatever the impact of the current conventional wisdom on media coverage has on the reputations of our politicians, we can at least vote them out of power.

'That is something we cannot do with the executives, producers, editors and journalists who control and determine what we're allowed to see of political debate. Although we like to think we live in a democracy, when it comes to hearing about how it's working, we're at the mercy of an unelected and unaccountable band of professional broadcasters and journalists.
'And that's why I think that the current situation not only does matter, but is also something that we should be worrying about - and why I also think that it's high time for a serious debate between everyone involved, including and especially us, the general public.'
If ever such a debate does get under way, another question we should be also be asking is: how worried should we be if the dividing line between between media reportage and media comment is becoming progressively more blurred?
Conference season 2011 blogging update:
Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition
Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?
Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses
A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions
Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news
Stand-up comedy From Ed Miliband

Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news

2011-09-26T13:42:00.009+01:00

In his speech at the Labour Party conference earlier today, shadow chancellor Ed Balls had a go at 'surfing applause' (about 2.45 minutes into the above clip), a technique that's seldom mastered by anyone outside the top rank of political orators (for more on which, with examples from Tony Benn and presidents Obama and Sarkozy, see HERE).

Could this, I wonder, have had anything to do with prompting some rather favourable reactions on Twitter, such as this from @ JohnHigginson: 'Talk from the faithful is that Ed Balls, who has always suffered from a stutter, is becoming better at delivering speeches'?

I also can't help wondering whether it was deliberate and, if so, who taught him to do it?

But don't expect our broadcasters to let a wider audience see it on prime-news tonight. After all, that would mean giving Mr Balls far too much airtime and prevent the likes of Nick Robinson, Tom Bradby, Adam Boulton et al. from spending even more time telling us what he was talking about (for more on which, see HERE).

A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions

2011-09-25T18:02:00.010+01:00

The latest edition of the News Quiz on BBC Radio 4 included a perceptive analysis of Nick Clegg's use of rhetorical questions during his speech at last week's Liberal Democrat conference.

Exaggerated?

Yes it is.

Should the BBC be broadcasting this kind of stuff?

Yes it should.

Is this the kind of show that makes the licence fee worth paying?

Yes it is.

Can you listen to the whole programme again?

Yes you can (for another six days HERE).

Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses

2011-09-22T11:04:00.011+01:00

PLUS

Having grumbled previously about Nick Clegg's past attempts to imitate David Cameron's walkabout apparently unscripted style of delivery, I was delighted to see that he stood at a lectern for yesterday's speech.

If you want to look more like a statesman than a management guru, that's the way to do it, even if you do forget to pretend that you're reading from the hard copy text in front of you.

MINUSES

1. Faces in the background

Fashionable though it's become for our party leaders to make speeches with some of the audience sitting behind them, I cannot for the life of me see what the point of it is.

During the 1992 election, John Major took to speaking in the round and, if I ever manage to unearth my videos of people yawning and dozing in the background, I'll certainly post them on the blog.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, party leaders used to speak from a platform, surrounded by colleagues all around them - until, that is, Harvey Thomas (former impresario for Billy Graham's UK crusades) got involved in staging Conservative Party conferences, where Mrs Thatcher was set apart from the rest so that any signs of audience dissent or doziness couldn't be seen by viewers at home.

Neil Kinnock quickly followed suit - and with very good reason. I have another video from one of his earliest leader's speeches, in which Dennis Skinner and Joan Maynard (aka 'Stalin's aunty') sat behind him eating sweets, shaking their heads and generally looking very cross.

There may not have been any such damaging distractions from those who sat behind Mr Clegg yesterday, but the possibility was always there.

Nor did it do a very good job in accomplishing the only defence for it I've ever heard, namely to demonstrate the ethnic and gender diversity of the party's supporters. I could only see one black face and not as many female faces as there should have been.

2. An unfortunate contrast

The power of the contrast in the armoury of rhetorical devices available to speakers was strongly evidenced by the fact that Clegg's recurring "not easy, but right" line was widely noticed and reported by the media as the leitmotif of the speech.

But, given the alternative meanings of the word 'right' in the English language, and especially in the world of politics, it hardly seemed an appropriate choice. If you're suspected by some of your supporters (and enemies) of selling out to go into coalition with a right-wing party, 'right' is, at best, an ambiguous word to use in such a context- and that too was spotted and has been commented on in the media.

Whether or not this was deliberately intended by Clegg and/or his speechwriters, I do not know. But I'd have gone for a safer option like "not easy, but necessary", "not easy, but unavoidable" or "not easy, but no choice."

On the other hand, if speeches have become as unimportant in UK political communication as I suggested in the previous post, maybe none of this nit-picking matters very much at all...

Related posts

Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?

2011-09-19T15:00:00.038+01:00

Now that the rights to my book Our Masters' Voices: the Language and Body Language of Politics (1984) have reverted to me, I'm planning to republish it with additional material on, among other things, how British political communication and media coverage of politics has changed during the past quarter of a century.

As a trailer to one of my main themes, I gave a presentation at this year's annual EPOP (Elections, Public Opinion & Parties) conference at Exeter University earlier this month, entitled Our Masters' Voices Then and Now.

The start of the party conference season seems a good time to post the notes used in the presentation along with the video clips illustrating the main points - not least because party conferences (and media coverage of them) have changed in similar ways (on which, see also recent comments by John Rentoul in the Independent on Sunday and Michael Crick on working for BBC's Newsnight).

This post is quite a bit longer than my usual ones - so take your time and/or read it in bits...

OUR MASTERS' VOICES THEN & NOW

It is obviously for readers to judge whether this is an objective analysis of how political communication in Britain has changed during the last thirty years or a complaint about the fact that it's changed in the way that it has..

And there are other questions on which I’d welcome the opinion of others, and especially those of you working in politics, the media and academic political science: does it matter and is it a trend that we should welcome or worry about?

For reasons outlined towards the end, I do think it matters and that it is something that we should be worrying about.

To start with, here's a summary of the paper that John Heritage and I presented at a conference at Essex Univerity after the 1987 general election. As it was just before he joined the brain-drain for a chair in sociology at UCLA, we never got round to writing it up (except in various posts on this blog).

Its main theme has been nagging away at me ever since - as regular readers of the blog will know already.

A SNAKES & LADDERS THEORY OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

Our argument was a simple one. If you think about the children’s board game, speeches work like ladders for politicians and interviews work like snakes for them.

In a speech, politicians and/or their speechwriters have complete control over what they say and, just as importantly, how they say it.

If they prompt cheers and applause, scenes of audience enthusiasm and approval are transmitted to a wider audience via television and radio.

General elections – as seen on TV – came across as lively contests between politicians who were doing their best to persuade us with passion and conviction.

So speeches worked like ladders in the game that could move a politician upwards on the board towards the coveted prize of positive news headlines.

Speeches = Ladders

In this clip from the 1987 general election, Margaret Thatcher wins applause by posing a puzzling metaphor (what does she mean by an 'iceberg manifesto'?) solved by a neat contrast that continues the metaphor):

The line was singled out from the speech and quoted verbatim as the lead item at the top of the Nine o'clock News on BBC 1:

Now it was in the wider public domain, Mrs Thatcher's attack must have annoyed the Labour party enough for their leader to include a direct rebuttal in another speech a few nights later, using a puzzle (how on earth could she possibly be right in calling it 'an iceberg manifesto' ?) that he solved with a three-part list:

After the first gong from Big Ben on ITN's News at Ten that night, the news reader quotes a slightly enhanced version of the line (it's now Labour, not just their party manifesto, that's "cool, tough and unsinkable") as the lead headline:

Nor was it just the broadcasters who routinely featured such excerpts from speeches on news bulletins. The parties themselves also had no qualms about using them in their own party election broadcasts.

In Hugh Hudson's famous Kinnock: the movie, a clip from a speech by the party leader was set to music from Brahms, followed by a panning shot across the (then) new red rose logo, a standing ovation and scenes of adulation from an excited audience:

The Conservatives were so impressed by this particular broadcast that it caused the only minor wobble in their campaign. They responded by producing one of their own that included a sequence from a speech from Margaret Thatcher which was almost a carbon copy, except that Brahms was replaced by patriotic music from Holst ("I vow to thee my country..."), followed by similar panning shots of a standing ovation rounded off with the leader and her spouse.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, this is surely the closest the Conservatives ever came to flattering their opponents in 1987:

In those days, then, political speeches were still an integral part of British electioneering and of the way in which political communication was covered by our media. But I still often use the first four of these clips on my courses - for the simple reason that I haven't been able to find any comparable examples from any general election since 1987.

This is because, over the years, the UK media have broadcast fewer and fewer excerpts from speeches by leading politicians, both during general elections and at other times (e.g. the party conference season).

For their part, politicians have either accepted or encouraged this shift in emphasis by making fewer and fewer set-speech speeches at large-scale rallies during election campaigns - and subjecting themselves to more and more interviews and other Q-A based programmes like BBC's Question Time - culminating in 2010 with the first ever TV debates between party leaders.

In other words, broadcast interviews and Q-A sessions, presided over by the media and conducted by their army of 'celebrity' journalists, have progressively pushed speeches to the sidelines and replaced them as the main form of political communication with the British public.

Interviews = Snakes

Yet politicians still don't seem to have realised that interviews work like snakes for them in the board-game of political discourse and debate.

Interviews are lengthy, discursive and seriously short on the kinds of well-crafted quotable quotes that can be written into a speech.

They feature politicians regularly breaking one of the most basic conversational rules of all, namely that questions should be followed by answers.

Media training and regular opportunities for practice have produced a generation of politicians who have become so skilled at avoiding giving straight answers to questions that interviews are arguably at best boring and at worst extremely irritating to the voting public.

Although there are plenty of books of 'great speeches', it can surely be no coincidence that there are very few (if any) books made up of transcripts from 'great interviews'.

To the extent that interviews do occasionally hit the headlines, they hardly ever bring anything but bad news for politicians, as when Jeremy Paxman asked Michael Howard the same question twelve times to no avail in 1997 (HERE).

Nor, during the strikes in June this year, did it do Ed Miliband much good when he was seen repeatedly giving the same more or less verbatim answer to a series of different questions - a sequence that went 'viral' and, at the time of writing this, has been seen by about 400,000YouTube viewers.

As the news from interviews almost aways come from blunders, slip-ups and mistakes, they are the snakes in the game that take politicians downwards on the board towards negative news headlines about them.

Leaders landing on snakes in a general election

In 1987, one of the most damaging example came when Neil Kinnock, still leading a party with unilateral nuclear disarmament in its manifesto, had tried to explain in an interview how the Britain would respond in the event of an invasion (i.e. by taking to the hills to fight a guerilla war).

This immediately made it on to the BBC's Nine o'clock News, which started by telling us what he'd said in an interview:

For Mrs Thatcher, it was a gift that enabled her to jump on to a ladder during a walkabout speech somewhere in the Midlands:

But Mrs Thatcher was by no means immune from landing on snakes, as happened in an interview when John Cole asked her whether this would be her last election:

Her answer to the question quickly became a news story:

Once the line had become news, Neil Kinnock used it to jump on to a ladder in a speech. Expanding "on and on" to "on and on and on", he was able to produce a neat contrast between two three-part lists:

Just before polling day, Mrs Thatcher landed on a potentially very damaging snake in her final interview with David Dimbleby, in which she referred to people who "drool and drivel that they care". When pressed on her choice of words, she apologised (twice), which suggests that she'd instantly realised how dreadful the headlines would be if she made no attempt to retract them:

Although this did prompt some negative reports, it had come so late in the campaign (barely 48 hours before polling day) that it did her little or no harm:

So the general argument in our original paper on the snakes and ladders theory of political communication was that speeches have great potential for generating good news for politicians, whereas interviews are more likely to generate bad news about them.

5 general elections later

And this is why I’ve been mystified by the willingness of British politicians to collaborate with the media by making fewer and fewer speeches during elections and by submitting themselves to more and more interviews. After all, when playing snakes and ladders, why would anyone in their right mind voluntarily opt for a set of rules with an in-built bias towards landing you on a snake?

Yet we’ve now reached a point where excerpts from speeches are not only rarely shown, but have become little more than a silent backdrop to the media coverage of general elections. For example, here's a BBC Newsnight report from last year, in which Michael Crick tells us what Messrs Clegg and Cameron have been up to during the day. We know that they're speaking because we can see them opening and closing their mouths - but we don't get to hear a single word of what either of them is actually saying:

In this next one, from the BBC's 1o o'clock News, political editor Nick Robinson is standing on a balcony telling us what Gordon Brown (below with his back to us) is telling his audience:

There was, however, one notable exception during the 2010 campaign. Three days before the country went to the polls, there was a large rally in Westminster, where all three party leaders actually did make speeches.

It included a barnstorming performance from Gordon Brown that prompted a number of journalists, including former Labour Party deputy leader Roy Hattersley, to write articles asking why on earth he hadn’t done more of it sooner.

On BBC's 10 o'clock News, Nick Robinson was there again, telling us that Brown had "come alive as never before in this campaign", while showing us film footage of him 'coming alive' in silence:

This clip was part of a 4 ½ minute report on the rally that included excerpts of 20 seconds each from the speeches by Brown, Cameron and Clegg (equal shares to conform with the Representation of the People Act) and 120 seconds of Nick Robinson speaking - i.e. for 6 times longer than we were allowed to hear from each of the party leaders.

Nor is this kind of coverage confined to coverage of our own general elections. In a 3 ½ minute report on one of the McCain-Obama TV debates in 2008, we saw 30 seconds from each of the presidential candidates and 2 ½ minutes from the BBC's Washington correspondent - i.e. more than twice as much as we'd heard from McCain and Obama - at which point, he rounded it off by informing us that the result was "a draw".

On my blog, I complained at the time that it would have been nice if we'd been been allowed to see enough of what they said to be able to draw our own conclusions, rather than being forced to rely on the mediated assessments of television journalists.

And this is why I think that the relegation of speeches to the bottom of our media’s priorities really does matter.

Why?

British broadcasters have the capacity, which they once exercised, to let viewers hear arguments coming directly from the mouths of politicians, delivered in their own words and in their own style of delivery - from which we were then free to reach our own conclusions about what we thought of our masters' voices for ourselves - w
hich does strike me as rather important in a democracy.

But today, the main choice we’re offered is between being told by journalists what our politicians are saying in their speeches
and having to listen to other journalists conducting interminable interviews with them on the off-chance – or perhaps in the hopes - that one or other of them will hit the headlines by landing on a snake (
which, in this age of carefully honed evasiveness, they hardly ever do).
Was it really the Sheffield rally what did it?

A few months ago, the political editor of one of our leading networks told me that the decision to downgrade speeches and rallies in favour of televised interviews had come from politicians, not the media. According to him, the disaster of the Labour Party's Sheffield rally in 1992 had scared the main parties away from holding any more mass rallies during election campaigns.

But I'm by no means convinced that this is the whole story.

For news broadcasters, it's obviously
much cheaper and more convenient
to wheel politicians into a studio than it is to send outside broadcast units around the country to cover election rallies (though, curiously, they don't seem to mind sending them out to film pointless walkabouts in schools, hospitals and shopping centres).

Interviews and other Q-A based shows presumably also appeal to media corporations because it puts them in control by requiring politicians to play by the rules set by a programme's editors and producers.
What's in it for politicians?
But I really don’t see what’s in it for politicians to subject themselves so willingly and continuously to the risk of landing on snakes in interviews - when they could be climbing up ladders that they've designed and produced for themselves in speeches.
I even suspect that the tedium of watching and listening to yet another politician evading yet another questions in yet another interview has contributed to the low esteem in which our politicians are now held. Whatever the politicians and their spin-doctors might think, any competent speaker of English - like most viewers, listeners and voters - can (a) tell at a glance when someone's dodging a question and (b) will draw negative conclusions about anyone who comes across as evasive.
Collaboration or capitulation?
I have no idea whether or not our
politicians have consciously collaborated with or have merely capitulated to broadcasters in relegating speeches to an ever-decreasing role in political communication.
Nor do I know if the broadcasting companies have any empirical evidence that viewers and listeners would rather watch interviews,

silent movies with journalists doing the voiceover, random walkabouts in shopping centres, etc. than excerpts from speeches at lively rallies - though I very much doubt it.

What I do know is that, whatever the impact of the current conventional wisdom on media coverage has on the reputations of our politicians, we can at least vote them out of power.
That is something we cannot do with the executives, producers, editors and journalists who control and determine what we're allowed to see of political debate. Although we like to think we live in a democracy, when it comes to hearing about how it's working, we're at the mercy of an unelected and unaccountable band of professional broadcasters and journalists.
And that's why I think that the current situation not only does matter, but is also something that we should be worrying about - and why I also think that it's high time for a serious debate between everyone involved, including and especially us, the general public.

Related posts on televised interviews

Do interviews ever deliver anything but bad news for politicians and boredom for audiences?
Snakes, ladders and the folly of Q-A campaigning
Interview techniques, politicians and how we judge them
Ed Miliband lands on a snake
Why it's so easy for politicians not to answer interviewers' questions - and what should be done about it
Gordon Brown's interview technique: the tip of a tedious iceberg
Related posts on media coverage of speeches
'The lost Art of Oratory' by a BBC executive who helped to lose it in the first place
'The art of oratory is fast on its way out': at last, some support from a top journalist
Will the 2010 UK general election be the first one to leave us speechless?
Political speeches can still make a big difference - like changing the date of an election
Blair speaks and the BBC tells you what he said
Obama’s rhetoric renews UK media interest in the ‘lost art’ of oratory
Is the media no longer interested in what goes on in parliament?
Did the media ignore Hannan because they think speeches are bad television?
Ten exceptional interviews from my archives
Politician answers a question: an exception that proves the rule
A Labour leader with no interest in spin!
A Tory leader's three evasive answers to the same question
The day Mrs Thatcher apologised (twice) for what she'd said in an interview
A prime minister who openly refused to answer Robin Day's questions
'Here today, gone tomorrow' politician walks out of interview with Robin Day
The day Mandelson walked out of an interview rather than answer a question about Gordon Brown
Mandelson gives two straight answers to tow of Paxman's questions
Two more straight answers from Mandelson - about failed coups and the PM's rages
Rare video clip of a politician giving 5 straight answers to 5 consecutive questions

Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition

2011-09-17T16:47:00.009+01:00

Having given a talk on using objects as visual aids at last year's UK Speechwriters' Guild conference (a version of which was posted HERE), I ran a competition inviting readers to suggest what object each of the three main party leaders could/should use to impress the audience in their party conference speeches (entries HERE, results HERE).

This year, to the horror of some, my subject at the same conference was 'In praise of PowerPoint: is there life after death from 1,000 slides?'.

So here's this year's party conference season competition:

All you have to do is to suggest a PowerPoint slide (or PowerPoint show of no more than 3 slides) that any of the three main party leaders could use to impress the audiences during their 2011 conference speeches.

You're welcome to make suggestions for 1-3 of the the main party leaders, but the judging will be based on quality, not quantity.

Prizes

1st: signed copy of Lend Me Your Ears.

2nd: signed copy of Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy.

3rd: signed copy of ВЫСТУПАТЬ ЛЕГКО (Russian version of Lend Me Your Ears).

How to enter

In 'Comments' below or email (via 'View my complete profile' on the left).

Closing date:

48 hours after the completion of David Cameron's speech at the Conservative Party Conference.

For inspiration:

PowerPoint version of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address

In praise of Brian Jenner & the UK Speechwriters' Guild

2011-09-17T09:50:00.011+01:00

I've often said that professional speechwriting is a bit like robbing banks.

It's a job that's done in isolated secrecy. You can't boast about your successes. And you certainly can't rely on your clients to go around telling their audiences that someone else had written the speech for which they're being so warmly congratulated.

So those of us who've just got back from the 3rd annual conference of the UK Speechwriters' Guild in Bournemouth owe a tremendous debt to its founder, Brian Jenner, for bringing together 60+ of us to meet up and exchange notes with others involved in this obscure and clandestine occupation.

With delegates from at least 9 countries in Europe and North America, it's now become a truly international gathering.

An added bonus this year was a Strictly Come Dancing style UK Business Speaker of the Year Award on the eve of the conference.

And, as in previous years, Brian also deserves our thanks for his genius for pulling unlikely rabbits out of his hat - by which I mean his ability to unearth relevant and entertaining speakers - like Fred Metcalf, who's jokes have won laughs for an extraordinary range of celebrities, ranging from John Major to David Frost and Morecambe and Wise (and prompted yet more laughter from those of us who heard him speak yesterday).

If you weren't there, you can see what you missed HERE.

If you're not already a member of the UK Speechwriters' Guild, you can find out more about it HERE.

You can also keep up with what Brian Jenner's getting up to next by following him on Twitter at @beachwordsmith.

What do Liberal Democrats expect from the 'return' of Dr Death (aka David Owen)?

2011-09-13T13:27:00.012+01:00

Mark Pack has just revealed news of the 'surprising return of David Owen to top-level Liberal Democrat thinking' (HERE).

Surprising, yes, but I don't know if 'return' is the right word for someone who left the Labour Party to form a new one (the SDP) that would be ruled by one-member-one-vote, only to ignore his own party's majority vote to merge with the Liberals in 1988.

Had he not done so, he would almost certainly have become leader of the new party, and would have spared Paddy Ashdown and the Liberal Democrats the disastrous (though temporary) consequences of continual backbiting from the Owenite rump SDP - not to mention the near-bankruptcy resulting from Lord Sainsbury's decision to divert his cash to the said rump (before bestowing it on the Labour Party).

Nor do I know if Owen's 'return' will include a speech at the Liberal Democrat conference next week. But I do know that, if it does, the audience shouldn't holding its breath for an inspiring performance.

Rhetorical Denial

Although David Owen was never a particularly brilliant orator, he was not only capable of using the occasional rhetorical technique, but also went in for what I've referred to elsewhere (see below) as 'rhetorical denial' (see below).

Dour though his delivery in the above clip (from an Ask the Alliance Rally in 1987) may be, he does at least manage to end it with a three part list.

Mark Pack reminds us of Owen's depiction of the SDP - with a rather neat alliterative contrast - as the 'tough but tender party'.

And he used another alliterative contrast at the start of the 1987 general election, telling us the 'reason not rhetoric will win this campaign.'

It didn't, of course, not least because Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock were still making powerful speeches at large rallies during that particular campaign (see previous post) - unlike the Alliance, which had opted for a new style of Q-A campaigning.

Hopelessly boring and uninspiring though it may have been, the Q-A format has, alas, become the dominant form media coverage of political communication in the UK.

On that basis, Owen may well have been ahead of his time. But it remains to be seen whether or not his 'return' will do any good for the party he so vehemently refused to join.

Related Posts

Our Masters' Voices Then & Now

2011-09-10T16:53:00.007+01:00

This morning, I was at Exeter University for the EPOP (Elections, Public Opinion & Parties) annual conference, where I gave a paper under the above heading.

In the not too distant future, I'll be posting a written version of it with a fuller story behind the video clips than it was possible to present in a 15 minute slot.

If you were there and would like to watch the clips again, here they are.

If you weren't, you might like to watch them anyway and guess what I might have been talking about - which, if you're a regular reader of the blog, shouldn't be too much of a challenge.

Since this appeared, the fuller story has now been posted HERE.

Curtain imagery from Winston Churchill and John Major

2011-09-05T15:28:00.013+01:00

Looking through video clips for a conference presentation, I came across one that I've often quoted as an example of how effectively a simple metaphor can be used to get a point across.

On being defeated in the 1997 UK general election, John Major had no choice but to resign as Prime Minister, but he was under no obligation to resign as leader of the Conservative Party.

But he did both and began his statement with the words:

"When the curtain falls, its time to get off the stage and that is what I propose to do."

I'd be very surprised indeed if anyone watching this responded (then or now) by asking "What curtain, what stage?" - let alone "What on earth is he talking about?"

Nor have I ever heard a similar response to the much more famous 'curtain' metaphor used by another recently defeated Conservative Party leader more than half a century earlier.

Having lost the 1945 general election, Winston Churchill, like so many of the prime ministers who followed him (e.g. Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown) embarked on the US lecture circuit in pursuit of a few dollars. At Fulton, Missouri in 1946, he spoke of an "iron curtain" that had "descended across the continent" of Europe (for more on which, see also HERE & HERE) :

Far from prompting those who heard it to start saying things like "What curtain?" or "I haven't noticed any curtains made of iron", the metaphor quickly became part of the vocabulary in the language of the Cold War.

Recycled images
These examples are neat illustrations of two rather obvious, but nonetheless important and intriguing, facts about imagery:

Whether you use a metaphor, simile, analogy or anecdote, it can be one of the most effective ways of getting your message across.
The same image (e.g. a curtain falling) can be used to get quite different messages across to different audiences.

This is why my book Lend Me Your Ears includes a whole chapter on the subject (Chapter 7: 'Painting Pictures with Words') and why I invariably use examples like these when running courses.

A dictionary of reusable images?
Having heard (and/or been involved in preparing) hundreds of speeches and presentations on a vast range of different subjects, I know that a "curtain falling" is just one of many images that can be reused effectively by different speakers for different purposes on different occasions.

As my collection of these continues to grow as the years go by, I'm beginning to wonder whether there might be enough of a market for them to fill another book, working title: An Anthology of Adaptable Images.

Arabic speakers boo at names too!

2011-08-31T14:35:00.007+01:00

"An imam leading the dawn prayer urged all Libyans to stand united and hailed the ousting of 'the tyrant Gaddafi', prompting jeers from the crowd at the mention of the former leader's name" - report about Libyans celebrating Eid on AlJazera's website earlier today (paragraph 4).

I was struck by this sentence because it represents the opposite of a technique for triggering applause that's described in my books as 'clap on the name'.

A prompt for boos & jeers too

I've noticed in other contexts, as when a crowd gathers on the pitch for the speeches and awards at the end of international cricket test matches, that naming one of the players (or umpires) quite often prompts booing and jeering.

So the fact that a name can prompt an identical response from an audience of Arabic speakers is something I'll be adding to my collection of evidence that there's something very general (i.e. cross-cultural) about the way in which audiences respond to different rhetorical techniques.

Related posts:

777: 7 Kindle books, 7 pluses and 7 minuses

2011-08-28T12:14:00.014+01:00

I've been a fan of Amazon's Kindle ever since signing a contract for digital versions of two of my books - when I discovered that the author's share of the royalties is about seven times more than the miserable 7.5% we get from sales of conventional paperback books.

Now, having just finished reading a seventh book on a Kindle of my own, I can report on the gadget from a user's point of view.

1. Pluses

My main reason for getting a Kindle was that I found the print in a book I was trying to read so small that it was almost unreadable without a magnifying glass. By letting you select the size and type of font suits you, the gadget solves the problem at a stroke (and I finished reading the said book much more quickly than expected).
The screen really does make it easy and comfortable to read for long periods - compared with those on computers, iPads, etc.
Very portable.
Long battery life between recharging.
Good connectivity with a computer.
Fairly easy to convert PDF and Word documents for reading on Kindle.
Spectacularly fast downloads of books from Amazon.

2. Minuses

Given the ease of reading via bigger fonts, it's odd that the colour and size of the Kindle's QUERTY keyboard makes it quite difficult to read and use, especially in poor light.
It's difficult to stand it up on a table without it slipping down - why it doesn't have a lever on the back for propping it up at an angle (like many portable radios) is quite beyond me.
No good for reading in the bath.
Although you can search backwards and forwards, it's far more complicated than flicking through a proper book.
Page-turning and other buttons make it too easy to press the wrong one by mistake and get lost and/or end up in the wrong place.
Pictures, footnotes, bibliographies, etc. are grouped together at the end of Kindle books, which requires much tedious manipulation if you want to refer to them while reading the text. As a result, non-fiction books are much more trouble to read than fiction.
I hadn't realised that, when reading a proper book, you're constantly monitoring how far you've got and how long it's going to take to get to the end. Kindle doesn't have page numbers, but does tell you what percentage of the book you've read so far. But, if it's a very long book 1% can mean as many as 8 pages of densely packed pages - which can be more demoralising than I'd realised.

3. Verdict

There may be as many minuses as pluses, but Kindle's supreme virtue (1.1) makes all the cons seem little more than minor irritations.

I do, however, think that Amazon should be trying to do something about some of the minuses, and especially those that would be so cheap and easy to fix (e.g. 2.1 & 2.2).

Yvette Cooper's precisely timed response to a contrast from Ed Miliband

2011-08-17T14:02:00.011+01:00

I noted a while back in a post showing how a member of the audience anticipated the answer to a rhetorical question by David Cameron that television editors are sometimes very helpful in providing detailed data on the interaction between a speaker and audience.

In that particular case, the camera switched from speaker to audience just before he delivered the answer to his question - with which a woman in the audience (on the left of the screen) was already agreeing before he actually got there (for more discussion of which, see HERE):

In the House of Commons, some members of the audience are routinely visible behind the person who's speaking, as in this next clip from Ed Miliband's speech in the debate about last week's riots.

What's interesting is that it shows just how quickly some listeners can and do respond when a speaker uses a rhetorical technique - in this case a contrast, with repetition and alliteration - to make a pont:

[A] To seek to explain

[B] is not to seek to excuse.

Yvette Cooper, behind his right shoulder, starts nodding in agreement before he gets to the end of the word "excuse" - at which point the MP sitting behind her starts to nod too:

In Our Masters' Voices (1984) I suggested that contrasts work to trigger applause (and other positive reactions) because the first part enables listeners to anticipate and identify precisely when the speaker reaches the end of the second part.

What I liked about this sequence, apart from Ed Miliband's neat contrast, was the way in which we can actually see Ms Cooper's positive response getting under way a split second before he's finished saying the word "excuse".

Foot note

This was also the first speech I'd heard from Mr Miliband since his nose operation and all the speculation about whether its real aim was to change his voice or to cure his sleep apnoea, which had made me curious to see if he sounded any different than he did before the operation.

As far as I could tell, his voice sounded exactly the same, but I do hope that the operation will have given his wife and children some relief from his alleged snoring - I say 'alleged' because I too am regularly accused of the same offence, even no one in the family has ever managed to produce any evidence (other than hearsay) in support of their complaints.

Words of the week from a bereaved father

2011-08-14T20:52:00.005+01:00

From the thousands of words written and spoken about this week's riots, these from Tariq Jahan, the bereaved father of a victim stand out as exceptional.

On YouTube, it's already been watched by about 100,000 viewers. Another 100,000+ have seen other versions of it and/or other statements by Mr Jahan on YouTube.

If you haven't seen it already, you'll find it as impressive and moving a two and half minutes as you could ever hope to see - and as time better spent than watching and listening to the hundreds of hours of reportage and 'expert' discussion on the media (e.g. on Newsnight) since the troubles began.

Horrible historian David Starkey has also got it in for the Scots, Welsh and Irish

2011-08-13T10:57:00.009+01:00

Editors of TV current affairs programmes believe, probably correctly, that guests who can be relied upon to say outrageous things are a sure-fire recipe for making their shows more entertaining - and may even help to increase their ratings.

Rentamouths

In reporting on this week's riots, BBC's Newsnight brought quite a few such 'experts' to our screens, including former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie and historian David Starkey.

Last night's performance by Dr Starkey (which you can watch in full HERE) set Twitter alight for a quite a while, with accusations ranging from claims that "he's a 'racist" to "he's bonkers".

I tweeted that I don't think he's 'bonkers' because it's difficult not to be impressed by the way he's managed to carve out a niche for himself as an all-purpose rentamouth. Like Mr MacKenzie, he can always be relied on to say controversial things that will shock, irritate or amuse a substantial proportion of any audience that happens to be watching.

For Starkey himself, an important spin-off of his 'celebrity' status is that he presumably sells far more history books than most professional historians.

Horrible historian?

As for how good a historian he is, I have no idea, as I've never read any of his books.

I also have no idea where he gets the idea that the English "don't make a great fuss about Shakespeare" (Question Time, 23 April, 2009), unless he went to a very different school than the ones most of us attended.

Nor am I convinced by his glib dismissal of Robert Burns as a "deeply boring provincial poet".

Whether or not his performance on last night's Newsnight exposed him as racist about black members of our community, the above clip shows that he not only thinks that it's jolly funny to make racist-sounding noises about the Scots, Welsh and Irish among us, but that he also revels in the boos and laughter his calculated insults attract.

Most depressingly of all, such 'entertaining' episodes inspire the editors of Question Time, Newsnight and other current affairs programmes to inflict him on us again and again and again...

Cameron's "up & running" (twice in 50 seconds)

2011-08-11T13:32:00.007+01:00

So far, the PM has had a good press on Twitter for his performance in the House of Commons today.

But, although my books and courses recommend certain forms of repetition, I don't think he gained much by using that over-used phrase from management jargon - 'up and running' - twice within 50 seconds.

If it isn't already on the #BannedList being compiled by the Independent on Sunday's @JohnRentoul, it surely ought to be.