Why is Mr Brown bothering to speak to the TUC?

Regular readers of this blog may have seen my previous comments on the way in which speeches feature less and less prominently in British media coverage of political communication (e.g. HERE, HERE and HERE).

As the party season gets under way with the Trades Union Congress in Liverpool, television news last night was telling us what Gordon Brown is going to be saying to them later today – and, in case you missed it, there’s plenty more on the BBC website:

In the rest of his speech, Mr Brown will also say that the government will take the "hard-nosed decisions" needed to steer the UK out of recession and towards a sustainable recovery.

"Today we are on a road towards recovery," he will say.

"But things are fragile, not automatic, and the recovery needs to be nurtured. People's livelihoods and homes and savings are still hanging in the balance and so, today, I say to you, don't put the recovery at risk."

Having opposed the measures that Labour has taken to support the economy through the recession, the Conservatives cannot be trusted to take the economy forward, the prime minister will argue.

"Don't risk it [the recovery] with the Tories, whose obsessive anti-state ideology means they can't see a role for government in either recession or recovery."

All of which raises the question of why Mr Brown is bothering to go to all the expense and trouble of going to Liverpool to repeat things that he and his aides have already put into the public domain.

The TUC, where 'fings aint wot they used to be'

The Trades Union Congress is meeting this week, but it's unlikely that you'll see as much of it as you would have done 25 years ago, when its proceedings were televised live on two channels (BBC and Channel 4).

Back in 1984, the miners' strike was still in full swing, as too was Arthur Scargill who was given centre stage to rally support from the TUC.

Granada Television were filming Claptrap (which can be seen HERE) and had sent Ann Brennan and me there in preparation for her own speech at the SDP conference the following week.

As you'll see in the following clip, there was a TV camera aimed at us as we sat in the audience and, though not visible, we'd both been fitted up with microphones. The idea was that, as Scargill was speaking, I was to show Ann which rhetorical techniques he was using and anything else she should take note of.

But we had to abandon the plan almost as soon as I'd started to speak, as the people sitting behind us in the audience were Scargill fans with some rather threatening advice along the lines of "If you don't bloody well shut up, we'll knock your f****** head in."

Not particularly pleasant at the time, but one thing I learnt from them was the pressure members of a crowd can exert on each other to toe the official party line. They didn't know what we were doing, and were assuming that I was criticising what Scargill was saying, rather than analsing how he was saying it - and therefore had to be silenced to let their hero rant on without interruption.

So the Granada team had to 'fake' it by making out that Ann and I had gone back stage afterwards for further instruction.

In fact, the second part of this sequence was shot a week later at the SDP conference in Buxton. To make it look convincing, I was told to make a note of what I was wearing at Brighton the previous week - and I've just realised that it's taken me 25 years to notice a continuity error I'd never spotted before - I'd remembered the jacket, trousers, shirt and tie, but, as you'll see when we get back stage, the TUC admission badge has mysteriously disappeared:

Einstein 'chalk & talk' competition results

Thank you to everyone who sent in so many entries that judging the competition has been far more difficult than expected.

As I was unable to separate entries (A) and (B), I've decided to award them equal first prize - so both of them will be receiving a signed copy of Lend Me Your Ears.

Entry (A) came from Oliver Coddington, who impressed me greatly with his display of mathematical bullshit, but Entry B by Chantal Jordan had to be given very high points for brevity and succinctness.

SPECIAL AWARD FOR TIMELY WIT:
Entry (C) from Andrew Tate can't really be judged on the same basis as the joint winners because it was prompted by a mistake in the original announcement of the competition, in which I'd specified a closing date that had had already passed. Once his alertness had made me correct the date, subsequent entrants were in no position to compete with his wit.

I have therefore awarded him a special bonus award in the form of a free copy of Speech-Making and Presentation Made Easy (signed and incorrectly dated by the author).

= 1st Prize (A): Oliver Coddington



= 1st Prize (B): Chantal Jordan



Special award for timely wit: Andrew Tate


If you missed the original announcement of the competition, it can be seen HERE, where there are links to the website where you can write what you like on Einstein's blackboard and to other posts on chalk and talk, PowerPoint and the use of visual aids.

Pre-conference season conference

If you thought the LibDem conference in Bournemouth was the first conference of the season, you'd be wrong - because there's another one taking place the day before they get there.

I know this because I've agreed to speak next week at the first conference of the UK Speechwriters’ Guild at the Arts University College, Bournemouth.

It's an exciting innovation for all of us, because presentation trainers and speechwriters tend to toil away in isolation and don't often get a chance to meet each other.

The theme is ‘Why is there no British Obama?’.

If I'd known what an impressive line-up it was going to be, I might have thought twice about accepting the invitation, but it's far too late to back out now.

The other speakers include Phil Collins, Tony Blair’s former speechwriter, as well as Dr Susan Jones, author of Speechmaking and the team from CreativityWorks in Brighton, who'll be showing their video on the Mehrabian Myth, a much more pithy and entertaining treatment of the subject than my various attempts at debunking it. Dr Johan Siebers who's pioneering a new university course in rhetoric will also be there.

Anyone who's going to be in Bournemouth for the LibDem conference would surely benefit from arriving a day early. And anyone involved in politics and business would find it difficult to get a day of expert insight at such a reasonable price anywhere else.

I understand from the organiser, Brian Jenner, that there are still some tickets available - and you don’t have to be a speechwriter to come along. Call him on 01202 551257.

Claptrap 4: How to get a book published



(This is the fourth in a series of posts marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Our Masters' Voicesand the televising of Claptrap, which you can watch HERE.

Part 2: EUREKA! is HERE
Part 3: News leaks out of the lecture theatre is HERE).

For academics in the 1970s, getting your work into print was never much of a problem. Publisher’s reps used to tour the universities with two simple missions.

One was to try to persuade you to put some of their books on your reading lists and get the university bookshop to order a few copies. The other was to ask if you had any books in the pipeline – and, if you had, they’d more or less sign you up there and then.

As the first lecture I’d given on the clapping research had revealed wider interest in the subject than I’d expected (Claptrap 3), I assumed that it would be just as easy to get it published as had been the case with my previous ‘academic’ books.

I could not have got much further from the truth: by the time I finally signed a contract for the publication of Our Masters’ Voices, I’d collected a grand total of twenty- two (yes, 22) rejection slips.

It was probably a mistake to write the whole manuscript before sending it to any publishers. After all, my other academic books had been accepted on the basis of a few notes, an occasional paper or two and a good deal of waffle on my part.

So, unlike these unfortunate publishers on whose desks there dropped a complete draft of Our Masters’ Voices , the previous ones never had to wade through hundreds of pages of tedious prose before reaching a decision.

Twenty years later, when I was writing Lend Me Your Ears, I learnt from my agent that it was much more effective (and much less time-consuming) to send a proposal out to likely publishers – and, though he 'd be too modest to say it, having a reputable agent is half the battle.

A PROMISING START FALTERS
Initially, things looked quite promising. Desmond Morris, zoologist and best-selling author ofThe Naked Ape and Manwatching was a fellow of the same Oxford college as me. He loved the book enough to fix me up with an introduction to his own publisher, the legendary Tom Maschler (and eventually wrote some nice glowing words on the back cover of the book).

Mr Maschler was friendly enough, but said that he thought the book would be much better if he recruited what he called a ‘co-author’, which I took to be a polite word for ghost-writer.

“I’m a bit surprised by that,” I said, “ because one of the few kind things reviewers have said about my other books is that they found them very readable.”

“But” he came back decisively “that merely reflects the abysmally low standard of writing in the academic world.”

I’ve no doubt in retrospect that I should have taken his advice. I was trying something that was completely new to me – to write in a way that would be accessible to any average reader of a serious Sunday newspaper, a book with plenty of pictures, no extensive bibliography and no footnotes citing every last chapter and verse.

THE ROAD TO REJECTION
Looking at Our Masters’ Voices now, I realise that I never got anywhere near the style I was aiming for until the third chapter – which also happened to be the most important one in the book. If the publishers I’d inflicted it on had never got as far as that, it was hardly surprising that they rejected it.

Many of them also had backing for their decision from learned assessors, from whom they’d sought an expert opinion.

Quite a lot of these reflected the vested interests of hostile camps within sociology, psychology, and linguistics, the main disciplines in which the (then) new field of conversation analysis was already having a significant, if controversial impact after little more than ten years in business.

Others were more straightforward in their dislike of the book, and I’ll never forget the one that said ‘people are already cynical enough about politicians without publishing this kind of stuff.’

A KEY CROPS UP ON A CROATIAN BEACH
By the time the twenty-second rejection came in, we were on family holiday on the Makarska riviera, where I met a British school teacher who was grappling with the problem of how to get another new subject (media studies) across to her pupils.

She was complaining about something I knew all too well from my background in sociology, namely that most of the available literature was relentlessly Marxist in approach, and she was having trouble finding anything that took a took a different line.

When I told her about the clapping research and Our Masters’ Voices, she was extremely encouraging and said that it sounded just the kind of thing they needed.

She also had a practical suggestion. Methuen were just starting a new series of books on communication studies, had I tried them and, if not, why not send them a copy of the manuscript when I got back to Oxford?

Without either of us realising it at the time, she had handed me the key to the door that had so far refused to open.

FATE COMES TO THE RESCUE
I thought no more about it until about a week later. I was back in college having lunch for the first time since getting home. In the common room afterwards, I sat down for coffee with a colleague from the Psychology Department who had a guest with him.

She was an editor with a firm of publishers, and not just any old publishers, but one that was very fresh in my mind: Methuen!

“Don't disappear until I get back” I blurted out as I sprinted back to my office. Five minutes later, the manuscript was in her brief case.

No, she wasn’t in charge of the new series on communication studies, but knew who was and would make sure it landed on the right desk as soon as she got back to London.

A few weeks later, I signed the contract with Methuen – 23rd time lucky.

My only regret is that I didn't exchange names and addresses with the teacher on the beach in Croatia, so I've never been able to thank her for mentioning Methuen and their interest in communication studies.

If she hadn't, it might never have occurred to me to thrust the manuscript into the hands of my colleague's lunch-time visitor.

OTHER POSTS IN THE CLAPTRAP SERIES

Should the BBC be encouraging people to surf the net during work time?

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A few years ago, one of my clients told me that an unexpected side effect of moving their head office staff from individual rooms into an open plan arrangement was that their corporate phone bill dropped to about 30% of what it had been previously.

The obvious, and from their point of view rather worrying, reason was that their employees were not longer wasting so much time making private phone calls that might be overheard by people at nearby desks.

What the salary cost of paying staff to make such calls was, I have no idea. But I am intrigued by the question of how much time-wasting on computers at work must be costing companies.

Some of you may already have seen the post a few weeks ago with my calculation that the salary cost of managers attending boring presentations was costing the UK economy £7.8 billion a year (HERE).

Having noticed that the number of visits to this blog falls at weekends and goes back to its higher weekday level every Monday morning, a question I've been Twittering about recently is about the salary cost to organisations of paying staff to surf the internet during work time. So far, no one has come up with an estimate, and perhaps most employers would rather not think about it.

All of which leads me to the rather more specific question of whether the BBC should be using licence payer's money to encourage people to read the their website magazine during work-time - as sen above.

Claptrap 3: News leaks out of the lecture theatre


(This is the third in a series of posts marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Our Masters' Voicesand the televising of Claptrap, which you can watch HERE

Part 2: EUREKA! is HERE).

The first time I spoke in public about the clapping research was at a conference in Cambridge, where there must have been someone from (or with a hotline to) New Scientist magazine in the audience.

Hardly a mass-market publication, but, as I learnt when the BBC phoned a few days later, it’s one that the rest of the media regularly scour through for stories that might be or wider interest. What they’d picked up that Thursday was a short report on the findings I’d just presented in my talk on ‘Some Techiques for Inviting Applause’.

Could I come to London to appear on Nationwide, their (then) early evening news programme, to be interviewed about it by Sue Lawley?

Well, yes I could, except that I had two children to pick up from school that day – a problem quickly solved by allocating some BBC licence payers’ money to pay for a taxi.

When I got to the studio, I was surprised to discover that they’d abandoned their normal coverage of the final day of the Labour Party conference in favour of interviewing me about political speeches.

But, as has so often happened in similar brushes with the media since then, they’d already picked out some clips from the week’s speeches without any consultation with me. And this was live TV, so the ‘expert’ would just have to hope for the best and busk it.

Luckily, the findings about what triggers applause were so robust that there was a very good chance of there being some nice examples before any of the bursts of applause they’d chosen. And so there were, which made busking rather easier than I’d feared.

A BOOK?
Talking to other guests who were waiting in the hospitality room to be interviewed that evening, I learnt something else that surprised me: everyone else there had just published a book that they were there to be given a few minutes to plug in front of an audience of millions, whereas all I’d done was to have given a lecture to a few dozen academics at a fairly obscure conference (for more on BBC book plugging shows, see also HERE ).

That was the moment when the idea of writing a book first entered my head, as too did a quiet vow to myself not to go on television again until I’d finished it.

And, as there seemed to be so much interest from a wider public, maybe I should try to write a book aimed at a much general readership than had been the case with my previous academic ones.

SCIENCE?
Back in Oxford, there were plenty of regular New Scientist readers, one of whom invited me for dinner at his college a week or two later.

He was a zoologist interested in human-animal interaction and was thinking of doing some work how people talk to their cats and dogs. The problem was that, if they were going to be able to make any sensible observations or comparisons, they’d first have to know something about how humans talk to each other. Before reading the piece in the New Scientist he hadn’t been aware that there was a field of research called ‘conversation analysis’, so he’d invited me to dinner to learn more.

While drinking the regulation glasses of pre-dinner sherry, my host introduced me to one of his colleagues, a physicist who also read the New Scientist.

“Ah,” he said “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but, until I read about what you’re doing, I’d never realised that sociologists ever did anything as scientific as that.”

I didn’t mind him saying that at all.

He probably didn't have much idea at all about what most sociologists actually do. But after nearly 20 years of doing pretty much nothing else, I did. I also knew that many, and probably most, professional sociologists would have been grossly offended by what he said.

But I found his reaction thoroughly agreeable and very comforting. After all, what had drawn me into conversation analysis in the first place was that it’s approach to observing human interaction was so much more rigorous than all the other methodologies on offer.

So to hear a natural scientist recognising anything at all from the social sciences as ‘scientific’ was recognition indeed – and I decided to conveniently ignore the fact that a proper scientist ought really to have observed more than one example before coming to such a momentous conclusion!

OTHER POSTS IN THE CLAPTRAP SERIES
• CLAPTRAP 1: Claptrap - the movie
• CLAPTRAP 2: Eureka!