Claptrap 1: The movie

This is the first in a series of posts to mark this month's 25th anniversary of a television documentary that completely changed my life and can now be watched in full below.

Before that, I’d spent nearly twenty years working in universities and doing research that was widely regarded at the time as being thoroughly 'useless' (i.e. lacking in any theoretical or practical implications whatsoever).

But a series of lucky breaks led to my getting the chance to take part in a World in Action documentary based on my book Our Masters’ Voices: the Language and Body Language of Politics World in Action series frequently attracted audiences of 15 million or more viewers - though 'attracted' is probably the wrong word, because it came on immediately after the nation's most popular soap (Coronation Street): it was also before everyone had remote controls, which meant that viewers still had had to make the effort of getting out of their chairs if they wanted to switch channels.

Such was the impact of the programme that, on the following morning, my phone hardly stopped ringing, with everyone asking the same question: "can you do the same for me?" Without realising it at the time, I had embarked on an irreversible journey from the peaceful seclusion of an Oxford college to the more hectic world of freelance consultancy.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging about some of the background leading up the publication of Our Masters’ Voices and the making of the film Claptrap.

It was called ‘Claptrap’ because one of the definitions of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is a ‘trick, device or language designed to catch applause’. I’d originally thought of using it as the title of the book, but decided against it because it would be too much of a hostage to fortune for reviewers.

Gus Macdonald, the film's producer who'd dreamt up the idea in the first place, had no such qualms about using it as the title for the programme - but by then, of course he did have the advantage of knowing that the experiment had been a success.

You can watch the film here in four consecutive episodes (and I hope you're impressed by my new Apricot computer!).

P.S. A better quality version of the film can now be watched in full HERE.

• CLAPTRAP 2: Eureka
• CLAPTRAP 3: News leaks out of the lecture theatre

• CLAPTRAP 4: How to get a book published

• CLAPTRAP 5: In the right places at the right times

D-Day 65th Anniversary (2): a reminder for Sarkozy and a challenge for Obama

Prompted by the news that the Queen hadn't been invited to today’s 65^th anniversary commemoration of D-Day, I recently posted a clip from Ronald Reagan’s moving speech at Pointe du Hoc on the 40^th anniversary in 1984. 

Here is an audio version of the whole speech that serves as the soundtrack to a neatly edited collection of pictures and film footage from D Day. 

I don’t know if President Sarkozy’s English is up to understanding one of Ronald Reagan's finest speeches, but it wouldn’t do him any harm just to watch the visual reminders of the Normandy landings. Had he done so a few weeks ago, he might have shown a bit more diplomacy when it came to making the arrangements for today. 

Meanwhile, the challenge for President Obama is how do you follow the great communicator when he was right at the top of his game?

(See also D-Day 65th Anniversary (1).

 

Obama: Echoes of Berlin in Cairo

Speaking in Berlin in 1963, President Kennedy showed how a few words in the local language is a sure fire way of winning approval (in the form of applause) from a foreign audience (clip 1 below). 

Today, speaking in Cairo, President Obama did the same with a few words in Arabic (clip 2 below), and also showed how a quotation from the local religious holy book can be just as effective (clip 3). 

And he came close to recycling a line from the speech he himself had made in Berlin last year (clips 4 & 5). 

Far from implying criticism of him for doing this, I find it very encouraging to hear him sounding as though he is serious about putting into practice an approach to foreign policy that he was only able to make promises about before he became president. 

But whether or not we should read anything significant into the replacement of  the word 'trust' with the word 'respect'  is a question on which I'd need an opinion from an expert on diplomatic semantics.

Inspiring speech for polling day by Peter Sellers

Last November I posted a link to the classic political speech by Peter Sellers to mark the 50th anniversary of its release on The Best of Sellers album - but have just discovered that the link isn't working any more.

What better day to put things right than by posting it again today to inspire us as we make our way to the polling booths?

The end of the beginning

Given the continuing mystery about whether the Queen will or won't be at the D Day commemorations later this week, it was good to see that so many of you had look at the speech made at Pointe du Hoc by Ronald Reagan on the 40th anniversary of D day back in 1984.

But I wasn’t really surprised, because it confirmed something I’ve believed for quite some time, namely that there's a greater public demand for watching and listening to speeches than the current media establishment seems to believe (for more on which, see HERE and HERE) – a point that has, of course, been amply demonstrated by rise and rise of Barack Obama.

So here’s another classic. One of the frustrating things for students of speech-making is that very few of Winston Churchill’s great wartime speeches are available on film.

A notable exception was his famous three-part list after the battle of Alamein in 1942 (in a speech at the Mansion House), in which each next item contrasts with the previous one and, not surprisingly, prompted an instant burst of applause.

Did the media ignore Hannan because they think speeches are 'bad television'?

A knock-on effect of Daniel Hannan’s speech is that this blog has experienced a ten times increase in the number of hits since starting to post comments on it a couple of days ago.

New visitors are very welcome and, as many of you are presumably interested in political speeches and media coverage of them, you might be interested in some earlier postings on the subject. The easiest way to inspect the full menu and access them is from the relevant page on my main website HERE.

One thing I’ve been concerned about for years may help to explain why the mainstream British media were so late (and grudging) in picking up on the story – namely that there seems to be a tacit conspiracy or agreement between the British media and politicians that speeches don’t make good television.

As a result, sterile and evasive interviews between top interviewers and top politicians have replaced extracts from speeches as the main form of political communication. And, if they show any speeches at all, you're more likely to see the speaker in the background while the reporter (in the foreground, of course) tells us what the politician is saying.

If you’re interested in more on this, you might like to have a look at two earlier postings:

Mediated speeches: whom do we really want to hear?
Obama’s rhetoric renews UK media interest in the ‘lost art’ of oratory

UK media slowly wakes up to Daniel Hannan's speech

Thanks to Google Alerts, I can report that some British newspapers have finally started to post news about Daniel Hannen's speech on their websites (mostly in their blog sections). Click on titles below to inspect what they're saying:

12.34 p.m. THE TIMES:
Daniel Hannan - the Americans just love him
POSTED BY TIMES ONLINE NEWSDESK ON MARCH 26, 2009 AT 12:34 PM

14.28: p.m. THE GUARDIAN
Why has Daniel Hannan become an internet sensation?
Posted by Andrew Sparrow Thursday 26 March 2009 14.28 GMT

3.32 p.m. DAILY MAIL
Tory MEP ambushes Brown, branding his leadership 'devalued'... then becomes surprise internet hit
By NICOLA BODEN
Last updated at 3:32 PM on 26th March 2009

Daniel Hannan v. Gordon Brown at the European Parliament

Gordon Brown’s speech to the European Parliament yesterday got fairly wide media coverage, but there’s been little or no mention of a powerful response to it by Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP for South East England.

Less than 24 hours later, Hannan’s speech has had 22,106 viewings on YouTube and has attracted 208 (mostly favourable) comments.* A link to the speech has also already appeared on the page about him on Wikipedia

If evidence were needed that it’s worth posting speeches on YouTube, as I recently suggested the LibDems should be doing (HERE), then this is surely it.

It’s also encouraging to see that at least one young British politician is capable of crafting and delivering an impressive 3 minute speech - and raises the question of why we don't get to see more of the European Parliament on TV.

* UPDATE 4 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 36,748 viewings and 833 comments.

* UPDATE 10 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 167,779 viewings and 1,660 comments.

* UPDATE 14 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 316,779 viewings and 2,787 comments.

* UPDATE 24 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 660,691 viewings and 4,560 comments.

Check the fixtures and fittings before you speak

Prince William recently gave a speech that, not surprisingly, received national media coverage. After all, here was a very famous person who had lost his mother at a young age and in tragic circumstances becoming patron of the Child Bereavement Charity, which helps children and families who have lost a parent.

It must have been difficult for him not to accept their invitation – and even more difficult to have to make a speech in which he could hardly not mention his mother, the late Princess Diana.

If that wasn’t going to be tough enough, he then had to speak without a lectern and without a stand for the microphone, even though the organizers must surely have known that it was going to be broadcast to a mass television audience.

The result was that the viewers saw a nervous young man standing at the bottom of a staircase with sheets of paper in one hand and a microphone in the other (see below).

Not surprisingly, it could hardly be said to be a model example of how to deliver a speech. However difficult Prince William was going to find it speaking about something so close to his heart, it would have been a little bit easier if he (or the organizers) had made sure that clutching paper and a microphone would not be necessary parts of the performance.

The very obvious general point is that, whenever speakers can, they should always check out – in advance – the room, layout, fixtures, fittings and equipment. Otherwise you risk falling foul of the inadequate arrangements made by your hosts.

How to improve impact by sequence, repetition and a rhetorical technique

In Vince Cable’s speech at the spring conference of the Liberal Democrats in Harrogate a couple of days ago, there was a sequence that would have been more effective had he (or his speechwriter) reversed the order in which he mentioned the two points, used repetition and packaged it as a contrast.

The line went as follows:

"Public companies should publish full pay package of all their highly paid employees [applause starts] as well as the directors."

You can see the sequence by looking here (1 minute, 25 seconds into the video), and will notice that the audience started applauding immediately after he said ‘employees’ and before he got to the key phrase ‘as well as the directors.'

As the current situation is that pay packages of directors already have to be published and Cable’s new/controversial point was that this should also apply to all highly paid employees, this would have worked better if the 'news' had come second rather than first.

It was also crying out to be turned into as a more explicit contrast between directors and other highly paid employees, with key words repeated, along the lines of the following:

"Public companies should not just publish the full pay package of their directors.
"They should publish the full pay package of all their highly paid employees."

Rhythmically and for adding emphasis, it would arguably have been improved further by making the second part of the contrast slightly longer, as in:

"They should publish the full pay package of each and every single one of their highly paid employees."

Either way, the applause would still have come immediately after the word ‘employees’, but it would have sounded more emphatic and there would have been no risk of the key point being drowned out by the applause.

Neutrality in the Queen's Christmas speech

In an earlier blog entry (12 November 2008), I looked at the way the Queen’s speech at the state opening of parliament each year is a model of how to read out someone else’s words (i.e. the government’s legislative plans for the coming year) with complete neutrality.

Although her annual broadcast to the Commonwealth on Christmas day is supposed to be her words to people in the UK and the British Commonwealth, she has to solve a rather different problem of displaying neutrality – not between different political parties, but between different religions.

As head of the Church of England, she's obviously free, and perhaps even obliged, to be open about her own Christian faith in her Christmas message, but sections aimed at believers in other religions have become a regular feature in recent years, as is illustrated by the following three extracts:

2005
"There may be an instinct in all of us to help those in distress, but in many cases I believe this has been inspired by religious faith. Christianity is not the only religion to teach its followers to help others and to treat your neighbour as you would want to be treated yourself. 

It has been clear that in the course of this year relief workers and financial support have come from members of every faith and from every corner of the world.
"

2006
"It is worth bearing in mind that all of our faith communities encourage the bridging of that divide. The wisdom and experience of the great religions point to the need to nurture and guide the young, and to encourage respect for the elderly…. The scriptures and traditions of the other faiths enshrine the same fundamental guidance. It is very easy to concentrate on the differences between the religious faiths and to forget what they have in common."

2007
"All the great religious teachings of the world press home the message that everyone has a responsibility to care for the vulnerable."

You can inspect the whole scripts of these and ones going back to 1996 by clicking on the title above. Or you can click here to see her in action last year, or here (after 3.00 p.m. UK time on 25 December) to check whether she has any more religious neutrality in store for us this year.