Is James Naughtie the most long-winded interviewer in broadcasting history?

At one point during one of this morning's interviews on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, I began wondering whether James Naughtie would ever get to the end of the question he was asking.

It reminded me of how often the garrulous Mr Naughtie has had this effect on me, and got me wondering whether I'm alone in wondering why the BBC lets one of their top interviewers ask questions that are often longer (and less coherent) than the answers he elicits from his interviewees.

So I found it quite reassuring to discover from a quick Google search that you don't have to look far to find comments about his long-winded style of questioning. Nor did it take long to come across some fine exhibits (HERE), and the following specimens are reproduced in ascending order of length.

I haven't timed how quickly Mr Naughtie speaks. But if we assume that it's somewhere around the average conversational speed of 170-180 words per minute, it would have taken him more than a minute to get to the end of the longest of these (184 words).

Is this another example, I wonder, of the BBC's apparent preference for allocating more time to its own staff than to the people we'd rather be listening to - that I blogged about a few days ago (HERE)?

Q: What's very interesting here is that we're very quickly back into the arguments, which are quite familiar about the reasons for war. And let me suggest to you, Secretary of State, that the reason these arguments are still quite fresh in people's minds a few years on is because they realize this has been a campaign attended by mistakes. Of course, there were people thought it was a bad idea completely. But even those who said, well, maybe this is the way to deal with Saddam. Look at John Sawer's, who's political director now of the Foreign Commonwealth Office, his assessment in May 2003 just after the invasion about what the American forces were doing there: no leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis. Now that was the Pentagon in Iraq. That was a mistake (140 words).

Q: But you see, the problem that we've got is that we know about Guantanamo and we know that Mr. Gonzales who is now the Attorney General has said in one famous remark in a previous incarnation with the White House that he thought the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and they didn't really deal with the situation we've got. And we know, talking about the American Administration, we know that 500 people have been for varying lengths of time in Guantanamo Bay without the trials and the protections that would normally be given under your jurisdiction and ours. And people say, well hold on, if this is a model war, if these are for high ideals, if this is for the spread of the liberal democracy of which you speak here, how can that be? You're breaking your own code of conduct? (141 words)

Q: To the Foreign Secretary in one second, but on the question of why we went to war, yes, it was said Saddam was a bad man who was a force for instability. No question about that. But the American people were told pretty straightforwardly we're in the business -- the American Administration -- of regime change. The British people were told something quite different and very distinctly different; that if it wasn't for the WMD than the whole game would be different. Now we know that those weapons didn't exist in the way that we were told they existed. And Mr. Blair tonight persistently -- that the argument in Britain was about regime change, and yet we now know don't we because of the arguments that went on and the leaks we've had from the discussions in Washington that Mr. Blair's party was regime change all along (147 words).

Q: But the question is not whether liberal democracy -- you talked about this in your lecture on the eve of this program -- is a good thing or a bad thing, as most people in this country, as in yours, think it is a desirable state. The question is how you go about bringing it. Now let me remind you and I'm sure you know these words from President Bush himself in the presidential debate just before he was elected October 2000. He said, if we're an arrogant nation, they will resent us -- speaking about the United States. Now the problem is that many people who try to look at this fair-mindedly, look for example at the question of extraordinary rendition, people taken to third countries where there may be practices that amount under international convention as to torture and they know that they go through our airspace. And the government said, well, really request every time -- a permission is requested every time this happens. Is a rendition flight only allowed through our airspace if the British Government has been informed? (184 words).

... and I bet no one's bothered to read all the way down to here!

Perfect book for April Fools Day: 300 pages of Gordon Brown's speeches

No, it's true.

It really isn't an April Fools day joke.

It's the day we've all been waiting for.

My publishers (Random House) have decided that 1st April is the perfect date for releasing a book of speeches made by Gordon Brown in the two years since he managed to get rid of Tony Blair.

How on earth did he find a publisher?
As I'm quite an expert on the difficulties of getting books published (for more on which see HERE) and on how awful most of his speeches are, I can't help wondering how he managed to find a publisher at all.

All I can think of is that the CEO of Random House is Gail Rebuck, who also happens to be the wife of Philip Gould (aka Baron Gould of Brookwood) - close advisor to Tony Blair and New Labour on polling, spin and anything else to do with communication that you can think of.

So was it the New Labour network that landed a publisher for Brown, or does the April 1st publication date mean that it's a not very subtle form of Blairite revenge?

And/or:
If you don't feel like buying the book, you can always browse through this selection of posts about Brown's speech-making - which, rather worryingly, is beginning to make me think that I might have another 300 page book on his speeches ready for 1st April 2011:

Blair speaks and the BBC tells you what he said

Yet again, the producers and journalists of BBC Television News have demonstrated their superiority complex when it comes to covering important speeches, giving far greater coverage to their own mediated reportage than to the speech itself.

Last night's news that Tony Blair had made his first political speech since standing down as prime minister took up 188 seconds of the BBC 10 o'clock News - which seemed fair enough

Except for the fact that only 19% of the coverage (36 seconds) was of Blair actually speaking.

The other 81% was devoted to telling us what he said and/or what others thought about it.

Most important in all this, of course, was the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, who had more to say than Blair, Cameron and Clegg put together and managed to bag almost half the coverage (48%) for himself.

Does it matter that the BBC increasingly prevents us from hearing what our politicians have to say, preferring to give far more weight to its own reporters telling us what they said?

Regular readers of this blog will know that I think it does - for reasons touched on in some of the posts referred to below.

But am I alone in being irritated and worried by this kind of reportage?


Related posts on UK media coverage (or lack of it) of speeches

Vince Cable shows how 'Yah-boo politics' can win victories for the LibDems

I've just been watching last night's Channel 4 broadcast of the Chancellors' Debate, and was fascinated to see that Vince Cable was the only one of the three spokesmen who prompted applause from the audience during his closing statement (see transcript & video clip below).

A victory for 'Yah-boo' politics
It proved something I've always argued, namely that 'Yah-boo' politics works just as well for the LibDems as it does for the other main parties - in spite of the LibDems' long-standing 'holier than thou' claim to be the only party that doesn't lower itself to using 'Yah-boo' tactics.

During Paddy Ashdown's leadership of the party, I often found myself arguing against such an approach, for the simple reason that we knew that 84% of the bursts of applause in political speeches are triggered by two particular types of message (or a combination of the two):

Boasts about our side: 40%
Attacks or insults aimed at opponents: 34%
Combined boast + attack: 10%
(Our Masters' Voices, pp. 34-45).

So, if you're really serious about refraining from 'yah-boo' politics, you're voluntarily reducing your chances of winning applause by more than a third.

Liberal 'Yah-boo' moments from the past
This is not to say, of course, that the LibDems have always (or ever?) been consistent in practising what they preach when it comes to avoiding 'Yah-boo' politics.

After all, Vince Cable's most famous line during his temporary leadership of the party was his 'Yah-boo' remark about Gordon Brown becoming more like Mr Bean than Stalin.

More than 30 years ago, during the 1979 general election, Liberal leader David Steel was also not averse to it, as you can see from this neat example of how to use a puzzle with contrasting solution to say 'yah-b00' to both the other parties at the same time:

[PUZZLE] 'There are two Conservative parties in this election.
[SOLUTION]
[A] 'One is offering the continuation of the policies we've had for the last five years.
[B] 'And the other is offering a return to the policies of forty years ago.'
[APPLAUSE]

Cable's latest 'Yah-boo' moment
In his closing remarks at the end of last night's debate, Vince Cable again showed how to use this 'plague on both your houses' approach to craft a 'Yah-boo' sequence that wins a positive response from the audience.

As with the Steel example from 1979, it showed that a rhetorical advantage for LibDem politicians is that there is always plenty of scope for making simple contrasts between the two main parties - and, in this case, Cable adds to the rhetorical impact of that by listing three dreadful things that each of them is alleged to have done - all of which are offered as the start of a solution to the puzzle with which he opened the sequence.

Then, as he moves towards making a favourable contrast between the LibDem's and both the alternatives, he's interrupted by one of the evening's few bursts of applause:

[PUZZLE] 'The question is who can you trust to do it?

[SOLUTION]
[A1] 'The Labour government led us into this mess
[A2] 'they've done severe damage to pensions and savings
[A3] 'they've wasted a vast amount of money on over-centralised public services.

[B1] 'The Tories presided over two big recessions in office
[B2] 'they wasted most of the North Sea oil revenue
[B3] 'they sold off the family silver on the cheap

'Now they want to have another turn to get their noses in the trough and reward their rich backers.

'I- I - The Liberal Democrats are different..'

[APPLAUSE]

'.. the Liberal Democrats are different.'

Budget eve message from Alistair Darling at the crossroads

Last year, I marked Budget day by posting the remarkable sequence from the early section of Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech, in which he showed that even something as unpromising as banking could be developed into a powerful and extended metaphor (HERE).

This year, I thought I'd mark the occasion with a clip of some economists - the governor of the Bank of England, Nobel laureate Joseph Stigliz and former chief economist at Shell, Vince Cable - showing how to deploy imagery about bumpy roads, party-poopers, tail-spins and illnesses to talk about our recent economic woes.

But then I noticed that HM Treasury had just posted something a bit more topical on YouTube, namely a video of the Chancellor Exchequer not telling us very much about his plans for tomorrow's big day.

As only 139 people have viewed it so far*, this could well be your first chance to see it. Apparently, we're at 'something of a crossroads', the government can 'help unlock private sector investment' and 'our competitors are not standing still' - and that's your lot as far as Mr Darling's imagery is concerned.

And, if you're a bit hard of hearing, don't worry: we tax-payers have paid someone to transcribe it and insert sub-titles (which has also saved me quite a bit of time and effort).


We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see if he's got any more metaphors up his sleeve, not to mention whether he's going to 'turn left or right' at the crossroads.

Meanwhile, and to keep you going until then, here are some rather more uninhibited metaphors from the economists mentioned above:


* In the first hour since putting this post together, the number of YouTube views rose dramatically from 139 to 223 - which really makes you appreciate the commendable value for money that HM Treasury is getting from our taxes.

** P.S. A comment added by 'headless' makes the interesting point that whoever posted this video - presumably the Treasury - made it impossible for anyone to rate or make a comment on it!

The swinging ball of death: another example of using objects as visual aids

This is the latest in a series of posts on the effectiveness of using an object as a visual aid (for a selection of others, see the links below) and comes from one of the Royal Institution's Christmas lectures for children by Professor Chris Bishop.

Apart from the sheer entertainment value, at least three other points are worth noting.
  1. The eager excitement on the faces of the audience after he tells them he's going to let go of the steel ball.
  2. The way in which they are paying close enough attention to be able to join in the 'countdown' for the second two of the three numbers.
  3. How their focus on the swinging ball is so precise that they start clapping at exactly the moment at which the ball reaches its closest point to the professor's forehead.

Media News: a decision is not going to be made

Our local newspaper, The Wells Journal, occasionally comes up with such breath-taking headlines or stories that they cry out to be shared with a wider audience, as when it told us that a council official was about to walk along path that doesn't exist, or when one of its pre-Christmas headlines warned of a 'Busy time for postal workers' (HERE).

This week's Journal excels itself with the lead headline and opening lines of its front page story about something that's not going to happen and a meeting that's not going to take place - pushing news of a local murder trial (very rare around here, thankfully) on to an inside page:

City kept waiting for news about store
A decision on which site in Wells will be used for a new supermarket will not be made this week. Mendip District Council has decided to postpone a debate and decision on a new supermarket after a last minute application by the Morrisons chain...

READ MORE and/or keep up with the latest from the Wells Journal (?) HERE.