Clapping out the conference season

Thirty years on since I first got interested in how applause works in speeches, I'm still adding gems to my collection of video clips. This year's star exhibit came when the accountability of clapping (or not) became headline news with David Miliband's reproach to Harriet Harman for applauding his brother's declaration that something she'd voted for was wrong.



It reminded me of a fascinating moment from the Thatcher era, when the accountability of not applauding in the right places was highlighted by Peter Snow in a Newnight interview with Francis Pym:



Viewing applause as 'anthropologically strange
When people ask me how I came to do the research that changed my life (see Our Masters' Voices and the Claptrap saga, links to which are listed HERE), my answer is that I was merely trying to follow one of the central pieces of methodological advice from the founders of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

According to them, the starting point for escaping from the limitations of the hypotehetico-deductive model of science that had held (and continues to hold) sociology and psychology back was to follow the maxim: try to view the familiar and the ordinary as 'anthropologically strange', no matter how mundane it may be.

To give you an idea of what this means (and by way of bringing my posts on this year's conference season to a suitable close) I've spliced together some close-ups of audiences in action over the past few weeks.

Before watching it, imagine that you're a Martian anthropologist. You've just been beamed down to earth on your first mission of exploration, you've arrived in the middle of an audience at a party conference and this is what you see. Then ask yourself what, if anything, you'd make of what members of this alien species are doing:


A research project?
If, having watched it, you're wondering why it ends with an artificially extended sequence of Michael Gove in action, it's because I think there might be something going on here worth further examination. Having watched it several times (!), I get the impression that there could be a connection between his eye-blinking and the rhythm of his hand movements.

As it happens, I have neither the time nor the inclination to pursue it further. But if anyone else can be bothered, I'd be fascinated to know what, if anything, you come up with.

This year's conference season posts:
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Conference season competition results

Blog readers were invited to suggest one object that any of the three main party leaders could use as a visual aid to strike a chord with their audience during their 2010 conference speeches.

Thanks to everyone for submitting so many excellent ideas for objects that party leaders could/should have used as visual aids during their conference speeches. The delay in announcing the winner reflects how difficult the judge has found it to reach a decision.

Most of the entries can be seen in the comments section at the bottom of the blog page where the competition was first announced (HERE).

As you'll see, the year of the Milibands inspired quite a few puns about rubber and elastic. Even more interesting was the recurrence of scissors and shears, as it underlined just how striking the images struck by the Archbishop of York and Margaret Thatcher had been in the pre-competition videos HERE.

Entries via Twitter included:
One from Martin Shovel suggested that David Cameron should use a hearing aid. I appreciate that he may have been trying to make a political point here, but was rather disappointed to see him making the common error of thinking that 'listening' and 'hearing' are the same thing. In any case, his entry had to be disqualified as a flagrant breach of the rules, which were quite explicit in specifying visual aids.

Another from Charles Crawford suggested that Ed Miliband should hold up glove puppets of Sooty and Sweep to symbolise his relationship with the trades unions. Nice idea, Charles, but Miliband's 'new generation' are far too young to remember such ancient TV celebrities, so I fear the point would have been completely lost on them!

Prize winners
  1. Hadleigh Roberts: Labour speaker holds up a copy of LibDem 2010 manifesto and says "Remember this? They don't."
  2. Colin McLean: Ed Miliband holds up an elastic band and says "This keeps the coalition together, for now. To keep the country together you need a Miliband. Better still, two."
  3. Jon Hindmarsh: Cameron brandishes a red banana with a map of Iraq on it - to symbolise the Miliband of Brothers.
Special Brown Nose Award
  • Andrew B: Party leader [of your choice] after rapturous applause holds up a copy of Lend Me Your Ears and acknowledges their deep debt to the author.
Modesty prevented me from awarding Andrew the first prize, but wasn't enough to stop me from sharing it with a wider audience. The least he deserves is a signed copy of his recommended visual aid as a token of the author's deep debt to him.

Prizewinners:
To receive your prize, please email your postal address address via 'my complete profile' on the left or contact page on the Atkinson Communications website.

The winner of the third prize may opt for a copy of Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy in stead of ВЫСТУПАТЬ ЛЕГКО (the Russian edition of Lend Me Your Ears), as originally advertised.

And if you missed my posts during the conference season:
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BIG SOCIETY: little applause

In one of Margaret Thatcher's party conference speeches (probably 1981, but I'd have to crank up my ancient Betamax VCR to check it out), she achieved the stunning hit rate of being applauded, on average, once every thee sentences.

During the last 20 minutes of David Cameron's conference speech this week, his hit rate was one burst of applause every eighteen sentences - a paltry one sixth of that achieved by his illustrious predecessor.

What's more, the more he talked about 'the big society', the more the applause rate fell. In the penultimate 10 minutes of the speech where he starts to move on to the subject (excerpt 1 below), the average applause rate was once every ten sentences.

Then, in the final 10 minutes when he really gets into it (excerpt 2 below), the rate went down to once every thirty sentences - one tenth of that for Mrs Thatcher in her prime.

Why such a muted response?
Closer inspection might reveal that part of the low applause rate could be explained by the fact that Cameron's delivery was more rushed than usual - and therefore didn't leave enough slots for the audience to come in. But that wouldn't account for more than a tiny fraction of the absences.

So, if the Conservative leadership's idea of the 'big society' is supposed to assert brand differentiation from Thatcher's 'no such thing as society', it's difficult not to conclude that their activists in the hall were neither impressed nor convinced by the concept.

But they, of course, may not have been the primary audience that he's trying to bring on board.

Excerpt 1: Penultimate 10 minutes


Excerpt 2: Final 10 minutes




Other posts on the 2010 party conference season:
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Delayed applause for Cameron's government - from the Conservatives!

During David Cameron's speech at the Conservative Party conference, quite a few mainstream journalists were tweeting on Twitter about how much applause he was getting. But although they'd all suddenly become experts on the subject, none of them had much of an eye or ear for detail.

Applause delay and duration
So, as in all the other speeches by top party speakers this conference season, they missed the year's most intriguing and recurring trend, namely the way in which some very key points that might have been expected to get instant or early applause that then lasted beyond the standard norm of 8±1 seconds (i.e. an above average display of enthusiasm) failed to do so.

These included warm words from Nick Clegg and Vince Cable about the coalition government (HERE & HERE), Ed Miliband's claims on 'the centre ground' (HERE), William Hague's boast about being in government (HERE) and George Osborne's good news about being in government (HERE).

What struck me as fascinating about these glitches was that they all occurred at points where you'd have expected an instant an/or prolonged response - if audience was in wholehearted agreement with what had just been said. Yet, in the case of the parties in the coalition government, the applause for coalition/government was at best luke warm and at worst minimal.

I'd have thought that such obvious evidence that there might be gap between the enthusiasm of party activists and that of their leaders for crucial points would have been worth a comment or two in the mainstream media - and I'm astonished that none of them seems to have noticed it.

The trend recurs in Cameron's speech
Given that Mr Cameron is by far the most accomplished British political orator of his generation, I wasn't expecting to see it in yesterday's speech. But it did - on at least two occasions.

At the end of his opening line, it took the audience the best part of a second to respond, after which they only managed to keep the applause going for the 'standard' burst of 8 seconds:


Exactly the same thing (1 second delay + 8 seconds of applause) happened again when he told them why they should be proud of what the coalition government had done:


The 'big society'?
If Tory activists were as muted as LibDem activists in showing their enthusiasm for the coalition government, how did they respond to what their leader had to say about the 'big society'? The answer to this will take a bit more time, but watch this space.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of footnotes about yesterday's speech.

Skewed eye-contact
If you haven't noticed it already, watch the clips again to see one of the few weaknesses in David Cameron's oratory: like Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown, he spends far more time looking to the left than to the right.

I've blogged about this before (HERE & HERE), and am surprised that he and his advisors have yet to do anything about a problem that's so easy to fix (Lend Me Your Ears, pp. 41-42).

Booby prize for journalistic banality
Cameron's speech came to an end with a classic and utterly reliable three-part list, in which 'Let's (...) together' was repeated and the third item was longer than the first two:

Let's pull together.
Let's come together.
Lets work together in the national interest.


On this, we were then authoritatively informed by the BBC's Andrew Neil (about 20 seconds in) that the PM was "trying to finish on an upbeat note".

Er, no Mr Neill, he wasn't 'trying to finish on an upbeat note' at all. He was finishing on an upbeat note. And if you knew anything at all about rhetoric and oratory, you might have noticed that he wasn't taking any technical chances when it came to ensuring that the ovation didn't just start instantly but got under way just before he'd finished.

Other posts on the 2010 party conference season:
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Delayed applause, poor speechwriting & delivery strike again in George Osborne's speech

This year's curious trend of party conference audiences delaying applause at points where you'd have expected an instant or early response was on show again in George Osborne's speech at the Conservative Party conference.

In this first exsmple, they waited more than a second before showing their approval at being in government again after so long in opposition - and then failed to keep it going for the standard 8±1 seconds (for more on which, see HERE or Our Masters' Voices).

This looked less like the activists being less than enthusuastic in their response than a result of poor speech writing and poor delivery, aided and abetted by poor use of the Autocue.

Poor speech writing
Having set up the puzzle of what's the good and bad news, Osborne started with the key point - "we are in government" - and left the negative thought of the country being on the brink of bankruptcy to the end:

The good news is that we are in government after 13 years of a disastrous Labour administration that brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy.

Had he put the negative first and the positive second, the audience would have been ready to applaud as soon as he got to "we are in government" (and possibly even before that):

The good news is that, after 13 years of a disastrous Labour administration that brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy, we are in government.


Delivery and teleprompter troubles
You may also have noticed that two indicators that he'd come to the end of the sentence were missing.

There was little in the way of emphatic downward intonation on the final syllables. Add to that the fact that his eyes remained gazing up into the air rather than returning downwards to look at the script on the lectern (c.f. Mrs Thatcher HERE), and the uncertainty about whether or not he'd finished was amplified.

Later on, when it came to one of his best lines, the same problems messed up a neat piece of imagery (that provided a solution to the puzzle about what they'll say at the next election) - greeted by another delay and a meagre 5 seconds of applause:


Practical implications
If you watch the whole speech, you'll see numerous other examples of the same problems, which have two rather obvious implications:
  1. For teachers and students, it's a useful resource for analysing how and why things can go wrong in speeches.
  2. For George Osborne, his speech writers, speech coaches and anyone else trying to improve the performance of a client, it's a rich source of data on how and how not to speak effectively.
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