Scripted & unscripted presidential victory speeches: Putin v. Obama

If you've been following the debate about scripted versus unscripted speeches (HERE), Putin's victory speech gives us a chance to review two comparable examples.

Those of us who don't speak Russian, of course, have to make allowances for any loss of impact arising from our having to rely on the simultaneous translation.

According to those who believe that speeches read from a written script sound (and/or look) 'less authentic' than those that don't, Putin is presumably the clear winner over Obama when it comes to delivering an effective presidential victory speech.

But that, predictably, is the exact opposite of the impression I got from these two specimens.

I also know that I don't feel in the least bit motivated to do a line-by-line analysis of Putin's speech along the lines of the one I did of Obama's back in 2008 (HERE).

Nor am I at all surprised that no national newspaper (or any other media outlet) has approached me for a technical comment on Putin's speech - and would be more than a little surprised if any of them bothered to do so.

P.S. Why hasn't the media published a text of Putin's speech?

Having spent quite a while on Google looking for things like "text of Putin's victory speech", I was surprised to discover that - unusually for what one would have thought was an important enough speech to merit full translation - none of our major media outlets has bothered to publish a verbatim copy of the text.

Needless to say, I think this is a great pity, as some of us are still old-fashioned enough to want to make our own assessments of politicians by hearing the actual words that come out of their own mouths, rather than having to depend on media-selected quotations or commentaries.

And, in this particular case, the few remarks that were translated did seem to be interesting and important enough to deserve full translation.

Ed Miliband talks during his own speeches set to music in Labour's latest PPB

These days, you can watch party political broadcasts before they've even been broadcast, as with this one from the Labour Party that's scheduled to appear on television tonight.

It has at least two irritating features that I've blogged about before. One is ghastly background musak - for more on which, see Is the sound of music on TV getting more and worse?

The other is that we no longer have to put up with television reporters telling us what politicians are saying during speeches in the background but can now listen to a party leader doing the voiceover to films of his own silent speeches in the foreground - for more on which, see Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?

Ed Miliband seems pleased enough with this effort to have tweeted a link that invited us to have a preview last night.

It leaves me wondering why - and short of long words....

News broadcast of a speech read out in full for 3 minutes: too much & too inauthentic?

Something very unusual happened today.

Presenter Eddie Mair told us on BBC Radio 4's early evening news programme PM that they were going to play the whole of Charlotte Church's statement after she and her family had settled their case for phone-hacking damages against News International's now defunct News of the World (above).

It lasted about three minutes - far longer than most clips from political speeches replayed on radio and television news broadcasts these days.

Regular readers will know that the British broadcasters' reluctance to play extended excerpts from political speeches and their preference for having their reporters tell us what speakers are saying is something I've been complaining about for quite a while (see, for example, Politicians and broadcaster in the UK" collaboration or capitulation?).

They'll also know that I don't believe that reading a written-speech aloud always means that the speaker is doomed to come across as 'inauthentic' (see To read or not to read? That is the question for speechwriters - or is it?).

Charlotte Church may not be a politician, but this unusually long clip gives us a chance to check on both these issues at the same time.

Was it too long for listeners and did she sound inauthentic?

I first heard the clip on the car radio, so you'll have to close your eyes or look away to experience it in more or less the same way as I did (though without the added bonus of the beautiful Somerset countryside).

Having done so, see what you think.

For what it's worth, I thought she made rather a good job of it - even though I could tell that she was reading from a text).

Nor did my attentiveness to what she was saying lapse for a moment - even though we're all supposed to have such short attention spans that we're incapable of listening to a speech for anything like as long as three minutes.

So I'm still wondering why it is that our broadcasters no longer allow us to listen to excerpts from speeches by politicians that last as long as this...

P.S. Fellow anoraks won't be surprised to know that the sound bite singled out for the headlines was a simple contrast: "They're not sorry, they're just sorry they got caught" (e.g. http://t.co/PjUzYQYQ) - which reminded me of my sons' Sinclair Spectrum computer chess game, which used to say after you'd played an obvious move: "I expected that!"