The way in which journalists monitor applause in political speeches and use it as a basis for assessing the effectiveness or otherwise of a speech is something that's fascinated me since writing Our Masters' Voices more than 25 years ago.
So I checked to see what columnists in The Guardianwhich had, after all, backed the LibDems at the election, thought of the Deputy Prime Minister's speech yesterday at the Liberal Democrat Conference.
Nor, given what I'd seen of it, was I surprised to find '..they gave him polite applause but no more than that' from Jackie Ashley and '.. it was telling that the silences came in the wrong places'from Julian Glover.
Apart from the fact that there were quite a few places where the audience refrained from applauding lines that should have been applauded, I was also struck by the fact that there were also quite a few instances of longish delays before the audience managed to get their hands apart.
Applause should be instant or early
The point about delayed applause is that, when the script and delivery are working well together, it should happen within a split second of the speaker finishing a sentence.
That's why contrasts and three-part lists are so effective, because they project a clear completion point where everyone knows in advance where the finish line is and that it's now their turn to respond - as happened after the third item in this 1987 speech by Paddy Ashdown when he was education spokesman for the Liberal-SDP Alliance:
Interruptive applause
Better still is to get the audience to start applauding early, because it gives the impression that they're so enthusiastic and eager to show their agreement that they can't wait - and the speaker ends up having to compete to make himself heard above the rising tide of popular acclaim.
One way to do that is to use a three part list, in which the third item is longer than the first two. So in this clip, the audience starts applauding Tony Blair just after he's finished the second of three items:
Delayed applause
In conversation, silences of anything more than about a fifth of a second before a next speaker starts to speak usually mean that some sort of trouble is on its way (refusals, disagreements, etc.).
In political speeches too, silence before the applause starts is not only noticeable, but also tends to create a rather negative impression - and the longer it lasts, the worse the impression is.
In response to the following question in Nick Clegg's speech yesterday, it takes the audience the best part of two seconds before they start to respond.
This may, of course, have had something to do with the fact that posing a question and leaving it to the audience to come up with a positive reply certainly isn't the most effective technique for winning applause*.
But the impression of a loyalist audience that's hesitant or reluctant to agree with the party's decision to join a coalition is not, I presume, the impression that the leadership wanted to get across.
* Details of the most effective techniques and how to use them are described in my book Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Making Speeches and Presentations (2004), Chapters 6-8).
P.S. A few hours after posting this, I received an email from someone who is at the LibDem Conference in Liverpool and who, as far as I know, I've never met before. It read as follows:
'Out of interest, the response in the overflow room where we didn't have any cameras on us was considerably more muted ... Might be true in all situations, but it was pretty noticeable.'
When Brian Jenner, founder of the UK Speechwriters' Guild asked me to do a 10-15 minute presentation at this year's annual conference, the challenge was to try to put into practice the advice of one of my heroes, the late Professor Sir Lawrence Bragg (for more on whom see HERE,), one of whose tips for lecturers was:
'There should be one main theme, and all the subsidiary interesting points, experiments, or demonstrations should be such that they remind the hearer of the theme. As in a picture, so in a lecture, the force of the impression depends upon a ruthless sacrifice of unnecessary detail.'
The 'one main theme' I selected was something I've blogged and written about before, namely how the use of an object as a visual aid can sometimes have an impressive impact when it comes to getting a point across your audience.
There were (of course!) three reasons why it struck me as a promising topic for a short talk at this particular conference.
It was potentially relevant for an audience of speechwriters, most of whom would have had conversations, if not arguments, with their clients about whether to use PowerPointor some other type of visual aid.
Being able to show the audience actual examples makes it a subject that's much easier to speak about than to write about (as I'd discovered when writing about visual aids in my books on speech-making and presentation).
It would give me a chance to give an implicit demonstration of a subsidiary theme that I'm also quite keen on, namely that short video clips are another type of visual aid that can help to get your point across with clarity and impact.
The video clips I used are posted above and the points I made about them went (roughly) as follows:
1. 'Peace on our time'
The picture of Neville Chamberlain holding up the piece of paper he and Hitler had just signed in Munich seemed a suitably famous example to feature on the opening title.
2. Holding up a boring paper
But the first time I realised that anyone could use a piece of paper to strike an instant chord with an audience was in the speech Ann Brennan gave at the SDP Conference in 1984 (for links to a fuller story of which, see the Claptrap series of posts HERE).
Her 'one main theme' was that the new party was failing to communicate with working class voters who'd become disaffected by the Labour Party. So we wrote a line that involved her holding up the background paper for the debate on equality in which she would be speaking.
It prompted immediate laughter and applause from the audience.
3. Paddy Ashdown holds up a newspaper (not on the video)
The next time I saw the impact a piece of paper could have was five years later on the tenth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's premiership in 1989.
Someone in Paddy Ashdown's office had unearthed a copy of the London Evening Standard from 1979 that carried a front page headline announcing that she would quit after ten years. So he held it up during Prime Minister's Question Time in the House of Commons and asked if she intended to keep her promise.
The instant reaction was was laughter and uproar from MPs; the delayed reaction came with action replays of the sequence on prime-time TV news programmes later that evening.
But we also learnt something else - don't overdo it. A week or two later, he held up another newspaper during PMQ, only to be reprimanded by the Speaker for making such a blatant attempt to grab the headlines again.
4. Senator Scott Brown holds up a newspaper
The same technique goes down just as well with American audiences. In this clip, Scott Brown has just won the election to take over as Senator for Massachusetts following the death of Edward Kennedy. The audience is already chanting enthusiastically, but their chants turn into cheers and applause as soon as Brown holds up a newspaper with the headline 'He did it'.
5. Examples of other objects (1) a glass
Using an object can involve things as simple as holding up a glass and asking whether it's half- full or half-empty, or
6. Examples of other objects (2) currency notes
A year before the 1979 UK general election, when still leader of the opposition, Mrs Thatcher came up with a successful photo-opportunity by using a pair of scissors to cut through a £1 note to illustrate how much the pound had depreciated since Labour came to power (see the clip at P.P.S. below).
I've seen economists make some neat points whilst waving notes about. And the reason why this is a picture of a pre-Euro Spanish note is that I once worked with a client in Spain who had a stunning impact on his audience by setting fire to a 200 Peseta note to open his presentation.
7. Steve Jobs pulls a rabbit out of a hat
I blogged about this sequence a while back (and a more detailed analysis of his script can be seen HERE). The things to look out for are how the audience reacts when he (a) picks up the envelope, (b) takes the MacBook Air out of it and (c) holds it up in the air.
9. Archbishop of York cuts his dog collar into pieces
During an interview on Andrew Marr's Sunday morning BBC TV show, Archbishop John Sentamu stripped off his clerical collar and cut it up into pieces to illustrate what Robert Mugabe has done to the people of Zimbabwe - a sequence that was replayed many times on the main news networks later that day.
10. Government minister throws his microphone on the table
At the 1982 Conservative Party conference, Robin Day inteviewed John Nott, who had been Secretary of State for Defence during the Falkland's war and had announced that he'd be resigning in the near future to join a merchant bank. When Day refers to him as a "here today gone tomorrow" minister, the Mr Nott announces that he's fed up with this interview, pulls off his microphone and throws it down on the table.
On the longer term impact of this sequence, there were two interesting footnotes. One was that Here Today, Gone Tomorrow resurfaced nearly ten years later as the title of John Nott's autobiography. Then, a few weeks ago, the sequence was featured in a Daily Telegraph article on the 'Top-ten Television Moments of the Eighties'.
11. More mundane objects can also work (not on the video)
A few years ago, I worked with a client who had built a very successful business manufacturing metal clips that hold lamps in place above streets and motorways. He'd been invited to speak about the fatal, legal and financial consequences that could result if any of the thousands of such products failed. He started his presentation to an audience of lawyers at a conference on product liability law by holding up one of the clips and explaining that everyone there had benefited from them, had driven under them but almost certainly didn't know what they were.
By the time he got to providing the solution to his puzzle, the audience was fully attentive and listened closely to the rest of his presentation
What surprised and fascinated me when I played this at the conference was that the rising 'woooooh' noise from the children and their response when the ball stopped just short of the speaker's head was echoed, with precision timing, by the conference audience as they watched the clip.
13. Conclusion: showing what you mean
As I noted at the beginning of this post, I'm a big fan of one of the founders of the Christmas Lectures for children and what he had to say about communicating science to wider audiences. It's to be found in a short booklet - Advice to Lecturers - published by the Royal Institution and consisting of writings by Lawrence Bragg and Michael Faraday, whose ability to take lay audiences to the frontiers of science used to fill lecture theatres until there was standing room only.
So I ended by quoting some lines from Bragg. Writing about how the interest of many distinguished scientists as first aroused by the Christmas lectures for children, he says:
"In recalling their impressions they almost invariably say not ' we were told' but 'we were shown' this or that."
A few lines later, he adds:
"The final result of the popular talk is measured by the extent to which the audience recalls it afterwards, and this fixation of the image is effected by arousing an emotional response of interest and thrill."
Chris Bishop's swinging ball of death achieved this both with the audience in the Faraday lecture theatre and, if the noises they made are anything to go by, with the audience in Bournemouth last week - demonstrating also that the traditions set by Faraday and Bragg are still alive and well at the Royal Institution.
For speechwriters, the moral of the story is that it's worth giving at least a few moments of thought as to whether there might be a suitable object that could bring 'interest and thrill' to the audiences for whom they are writing.
P.S. Given the third of my reasons for selecting this topic (at the start of this post) I was delighted when someone in my audience posted this on Twitter: V stimulating day in Bournemouth - @maxatkinson gave a terrific example of how to use (short) video clips as a visual aid.
Whether or not it also works on a blog post is something readers can judge for themselves...
P.P.S. Since posting this a few hours ago, a request in the original version - 'if anyone knows where I could get a copy of this, please let me know where' - has been answered by Chris Rodgers (via Twitter (@ChrisPRodgers), to whom I am very grateful indeed for sending the YouTube link. I was also mistaken in thinking it was 'during the 1979 general election', as it was in fact a year before that:
In the good old days (25+ years ago), you could watch speeches at the Trades Union Congress (and the rest of the conference season) live and continuously on television throughout the day.
Nowadays, we have to make do with short clips selected for us by TV news editors (or by people who post videos on YouTube).
Better than nothing, perhaps, but it will make it quite a challenge if anyone ever wants to check out and/or replicate what John Heritage and I did in 1981, which was to use our shining new Betamax VCRsto record 476 speeches at the three main party conferences that year (detailed results of which were published HERE in 1986).
Easier though the internet has made it to collect video clips these days, there are some irritating frustrations. Having made it possible to embed some of their videos in websites and blogs a couple of months ago, the BBC website now seems to have withdrawn this facility.
This is a pity, because I'd like to have juxtaposed this rather interesting statement from Mervyn King (for which, thanks to Sky News for its embedding option) with union leader Bob Crow's equally interesting explanation of why he wasn't going to listen to the governor of the Bank of England (which can be seen half-way down a page on the BBC website HERE).
