Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?

Now that the rights to my book Our Masters' Voices: the Language and Body Language of Politics (1984) have reverted to me, I'm planning to republish it with additional material on, among other things, how British political communication and media coverage of politics has changed during the past quarter of a century.

As a trailer to one of my main themes, I gave a presentation at this year's annual EPOP (Elections, Public Opinion & Parties) conference at Exeter University earlier this month, entitled Our Masters' Voices Then and Now.

The start of the party conference season seems a good time to post the notes used in the presentation along with the video clips illustrating the main points - not least because party conferences (and media coverage of them) have changed in similar ways (on which, see also recent comments by John Rentoul in the Independent on Sunday and Michael Crick on working for BBC's Newsnight).

This post is quite a bit longer than my usual ones - so take your time and/or read it in bits...

OUR MASTERS' VOICES THEN & NOW

It is obviously for readers to judge whether this is an objective analysis of how political communication in Britain has changed during the last thirty years or a complaint about the fact that it's changed in the way that it has..

And there are other questions on which I’d welcome the opinion of others, and especially those of you working in politics, the media and academic political science: does it matter and is it a trend that we should welcome or worry about?

For reasons outlined towards the end, I do think it matters and that it is something that we should be worrying about.

To start with, here's a summary of the paper that John Heritage and I presented at a conference at Essex Univerity after the 1987 general election. As it was just before he joined the brain-drain for a chair in sociology at UCLA, we never got round to writing it up (except in various posts on this blog).

Its main theme has been nagging away at me ever since - as regular readers of the blog will know already.

A SNAKES & LADDERS THEORY OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

Our argument was a simple one. If you think about the children’s board game, speeches work like ladders for politicians and interviews work like snakes for them.

In a speech, politicians and/or their speechwriters have complete control over what they say and, just as importantly, how they say it.

If they prompt cheers and applause, scenes of audience enthusiasm and approval are transmitted to a wider audience via television and radio.

General elections – as seen on TV – came across as lively contests between politicians who were doing their best to persuade us with passion and conviction.

So speeches worked like ladders in the game that could move a politician upwards on the board towards the coveted prize of positive news headlines.

Speeches = Ladders
In this clip from the 1987 general election, Margaret Thatcher wins applause by posing a puzzling metaphor (what does she mean by an 'iceberg manifesto'?) solved by a neat contrast that continues the metaphor):


The line was singled out from the speech and quoted verbatim as the lead item at the top of the Nine o'clock News on BBC 1:


Now it was in the wider public domain, Mrs Thatcher's attack must have annoyed the Labour party enough for their leader to include a direct rebuttal in another speech a few nights later, using a puzzle (how on earth could she possibly be right in calling it 'an iceberg manifesto' ?) that he solved with a three-part list:


After the first gong from Big Ben on ITN's News at Ten that night, the news reader quotes a slightly enhanced version of the line (it's now Labour, not just their party manifesto, that's "cool, tough and unsinkable") as the lead headline:


Nor was it just the broadcasters who routinely featured such excerpts from speeches on news bulletins. The parties themselves also had no qualms about using them in their own party election broadcasts.

In Hugh Hudson's famous Kinnock: the movie, a clip from a speech by the party leader was set to music from Brahms, followed by a panning shot across the (then) new red rose logo, a standing ovation and scenes of adulation from an excited audience:


The Conservatives were so impressed by this particular broadcast that it caused the only minor wobble in their campaign. They responded by producing one of their own that included a sequence from a speech from Margaret Thatcher which was almost a carbon copy, except that Brahms was replaced by patriotic music from Holst ("I vow to thee my country..."), followed by similar panning shots of a standing ovation rounded off with the leader and her spouse.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, this is surely the closest the Conservatives ever came to flattering their opponents in 1987:


In those days, then, political speeches were still an integral part of British electioneering and of the way in which political communication was covered by our media. But I still often use the first four of these clips on my courses - for the simple reason that I haven't been able to find any comparable examples from any general election since 1987.

This is because, over the years, the UK media have broadcast fewer and fewer excerpts from speeches by leading politicians, both during general elections and at other times (e.g. the party conference season).

For their part, politicians have either accepted or encouraged this shift in emphasis by making fewer and fewer set-speech speeches at large-scale rallies during election campaigns - and subjecting themselves to more and more interviews and other Q-A based programmes like BBC's Question Time - culminating in 2010 with the first ever TV debates between party leaders.

In other words, broadcast interviews and Q-A sessions, presided over by the media and conducted by their army of 'celebrity' journalists, have progressively pushed speeches to the sidelines and replaced them as the main form of political communication with the British public.

Interviews = Snakes
Yet politicians still don't seem to have realised that interviews work like snakes for them in the board-game of political discourse and debate.

Interviews are lengthy, discursive and seriously short on the kinds of well-crafted quotable quotes that can be written into a speech.

They feature politicians regularly breaking one of the most basic conversational rules of all, namely that questions should be followed by answers.

Media training and regular opportunities for practice have produced a generation of politicians who have become so skilled at avoiding giving straight answers to questions that interviews are arguably at best boring and at worst extremely irritating to the voting public.

Although there are plenty of books of 'great speeches', it can surely be no coincidence that there are very few (if any) books made up of transcripts from 'great interviews'.

To the extent that interviews do occasionally hit the headlines, they hardly ever bring anything but bad news for politicians, as when Jeremy Paxman asked Michael Howard the same question twelve times to no avail in 1997 (HERE).

Nor, during the strikes in June this year, did it do Ed Miliband much good when he was seen repeatedly giving the same more or less verbatim answer to a series of different questions - a sequence that went 'viral' and, at the time of writing this, has been seen by about 400,000YouTube viewers.

As the news from interviews almost aways come from blunders, slip-ups and mistakes, they are the snakes in the game that take politicians downwards on the board towards negative news headlines about them.

Leaders landing on snakes in a general election
In 1987, one of the most damaging example came when Neil Kinnock, still leading a party with unilateral nuclear disarmament in its manifesto, had tried to explain in an interview how the Britain would respond in the event of an invasion (i.e. by taking to the hills to fight a guerilla war).

This immediately made it on to the BBC's Nine o'clock News, which started by telling us what he'd said in an interview:



For Mrs Thatcher, it was a gift that enabled her to jump on to a ladder during a walkabout speech somewhere in the Midlands:


But Mrs Thatcher was by no means immune from landing on snakes, as happened in an interview when John Cole asked her whether this would be her last election:


Her answer to the question quickly became a news story:


Once the line had become news, Neil Kinnock used it to jump on to a ladder in a speech. Expanding "on and on" to "on and on and on", he was able to produce a neat contrast between two three-part lists:


Just before polling day, Mrs Thatcher landed on a potentially very damaging snake in her final interview with David Dimbleby, in which she referred to people who "drool and drivel that they care". When pressed on her choice of words, she apologised (twice), which suggests that she'd instantly realised how dreadful the headlines would be if she made no attempt to retract them:


Although this did prompt some negative reports, it had come so late in the campaign (barely 48 hours before polling day) that it did her little or no harm:

So the general argument in our original paper on the snakes and ladders theory of political communication was that speeches have great potential for generating good news for politicians, whereas interviews are more likely to generate bad news about them.

5 general elections later
And this is why I’ve been mystified by the willingness of British politicians to collaborate with the media by making fewer and fewer speeches during elections and by submitting themselves to more and more interviews. After all, when playing snakes and ladders, why would anyone in their right mind voluntarily opt for a set of rules with an in-built bias towards landing you on a snake?

Yet we’ve now reached a point where excerpts from speeches are not only rarely shown, but have become little more than a silent backdrop to the media coverage of general elections. For example, here's a BBC Newsnight report from last year, in which Michael Crick tells us what Messrs Clegg and Cameron have been up to during the day. We know that they're speaking because we can see them opening and closing their mouths - but we don't get to hear a single word of what either of them is actually saying:


In this next one, from the BBC's 1o o'clock News, political editor Nick Robinson is standing on a balcony telling us what Gordon Brown (below with his back to us) is telling his audience:


There was, however, one notable exception during the 2010 campaign. Three days before the country went to the polls, there was a large rally in Westminster, where all three party leaders actually did make speeches.

It included a barnstorming performance from Gordon Brown that prompted a number of journalists, including former Labour Party deputy leader Roy Hattersley, to write articles asking why on earth he hadn’t done more of it sooner.

On BBC's 10 o'clock News, Nick Robinson was there again, telling us that Brown had "come alive as never before in this campaign", while showing us film footage of him 'coming alive' in silence:


This clip was part of a 4 ½ minute report on the rally that included excerpts of 20 seconds each from the speeches by Brown, Cameron and Clegg (equal shares to conform with the Representation of the People Act) and 120 seconds of Nick Robinson speaking - i.e. for 6 times longer than we were allowed to hear from each of the party leaders.

Nor is this kind of coverage confined to coverage of our own general elections. In a 3 ½ minute report on one of the McCain-Obama TV debates in 2008, we saw 30 seconds from each of the presidential candidates and 2 ½ minutes from the BBC's Washington correspondent - i.e. more than twice as much as we'd heard from McCain and Obama - at which point, he rounded it off by informing us that the result was "a draw".

On my blog, I complained at the time that it would have been nice if we'd been been allowed to see enough of what they said to be able to draw our own conclusions, rather than being forced to rely on the mediated assessments of television journalists.


And this is why I think that the relegation of speeches to the bottom of our media’s priorities really does matter.


Why?

British broadcasters have the capacity, which they once exercised, to let viewers hear arguments coming directly from the mouths of politicians, delivered in their own words and in their own style of delivery - from which we were then free to reach our own conclusions about what we thought of our masters' voices for ourselves - w

hich does strike me as rather important in a democracy.

But today, the main choice we’re offered is between being told by journalists what our politicians are saying in their speeches

and having to listen to other journalists conducting interminable interviews with them on the off-chance – or perhaps in the hopes - that one or other of them will hit the headlines by landing on a snake (

which, in this age of carefully honed evasiveness, they hardly ever do).

Was it really the Sheffield rally what did it?

A few months ago, the political editor of one of our leading networks told me that the decision to downgrade speeches and rallies in favour of televised interviews had come from politicians, not the media. According to him, the disaster of the Labour Party's Sheffield rally in 1992 had scared the main parties away from holding any more mass rallies during election campaigns.

But I'm by no means convinced that this is the whole story.


For news broadcasters, it's obviously

much cheaper and more convenient

to wheel politicians into a studio than it is to send outside broadcast units around the country to cover election rallies (though, curiously, they don't seem to mind sending them out to film pointless walkabouts in schools, hospitals and shopping centres).

Interviews and other Q-A based shows presumably also appeal to media corporations because it puts them in control by requiring politicians to play by the rules set by a programme's editors and producers.

What's in it for politicians?

But I really don’t see what’s in it for politicians to subject themselves so willingly and continuously to the risk of landing on snakes in interviews - when they could be climbing up ladders that they've designed and produced for themselves in speeches.

I even suspect that the tedium of watching and listening to yet another politician evading yet another questions in yet another interview has contributed to the low esteem in which our politicians are now held. Whatever the politicians and their spin-doctors might think, any competent speaker of English - like most viewers, listeners and voters - can (a) tell at a glance when someone's dodging a question and (b) will draw negative conclusions about anyone who comes across as evasive.

Collaboration or capitulation?

I have no idea whether or not our

politicians have consciously collaborated with or have merely capitulated to broadcasters in relegating speeches to an ever-decreasing role in political communication.

Nor do I know if the broadcasting companies have any empirical evidence that viewers and listeners would rather watch interviews,

silent movies with journalists doing the voiceover, random walkabouts in shopping centres, etc. than excerpts from speeches at lively rallies - though I very much doubt it.

What I do know is that, whatever the impact of the current conventional wisdom on media coverage has on the reputations of our politicians, we can at least vote them out of power.

That is something we cannot do with the executives, producers, editors and journalists who control and determine what we're allowed to see of political debate. Although we like to think we live in a democracy, when it comes to hearing about how it's working, we're at the mercy of an unelected and unaccountable band of professional broadcasters and journalists.

And that's why I think that the current situation not only does matter, but is also something that we should be worrying about - and why I also think that it's high time for a serious debate between everyone involved, including and especially us, the general public.

Related posts on televised interviews

Related posts on media coverage of speeches
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Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition

Having given a talk on using objects as visual aids at last year's UK Speechwriters' Guild conference (a version of which was posted HERE), I ran a competition inviting readers to suggest what object each of the three main party leaders could/should use to impress the audience in their party conference speeches (entries HERE, results HERE).

This year, to the horror of some, my subject at the same conference was 'In praise of PowerPoint: is there life after death from 1,000 slides?'.

So here's this year's party conference season competition:
All you have to do is to suggest a PowerPoint slide (or PowerPoint show of no more than 3 slides) that any of the three main party leaders could use to impress the audiences during their 2011 conference speeches.

You're welcome to make suggestions for 1-3 of the the main party leaders, but the judging will be based on quality, not quantity.

Prizes
1st: signed copy of Lend Me Your Ears.
3rd: signed copy of ВЫСТУПАТЬ ЛЕГКО (Russian version of Lend Me Your Ears).

How to enter
In 'Comments' below or email (via 'View my complete profile' on the left).

Closing date:
48 hours after the completion of David Cameron's speech at the Conservative Party Conference.

For inspiration:
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In praise of Brian Jenner & the UK Speechwriters' Guild

I've often said that professional speechwriting is a bit like robbing banks.

It's a job that's done in isolated secrecy. You can't boast about your successes. And you certainly can't rely on your clients to go around telling their audiences that someone else had written the speech for which they're being so warmly congratulated.

So those of us who've just got back from the 3rd annual conference of the UK Speechwriters' Guild in Bournemouth owe a tremendous debt to its founder, Brian Jenner, for bringing together 60+ of us to meet up and exchange notes with others involved in this obscure and clandestine occupation.

With delegates from at least 9 countries in Europe and North America, it's now become a truly international gathering.

An added bonus this year was a Strictly Come Dancing style UK Business Speaker of the Year Award on the eve of the conference.

And, as in previous years, Brian also deserves our thanks for his genius for pulling unlikely rabbits out of his hat - by which I mean his ability to unearth relevant and entertaining speakers - like Fred Metcalf, who's jokes have won laughs for an extraordinary range of celebrities, ranging from John Major to David Frost and Morecambe and Wise (and prompted yet more laughter from those of us who heard him speak yesterday).

If you weren't there, you can see what you missed HERE.

If you're not already a member of the UK Speechwriters' Guild, you can find out more about it HERE.

You can also keep up with what Brian Jenner's getting up to next by following him on Twitter at @beachwordsmith.

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What do Liberal Democrats expect from the 'return' of Dr Death (aka David Owen)?


Mark Pack has just revealed news of the 'surprising return of David Owen to top-level Liberal Democrat thinking' (HERE).

Surprising, yes, but I don't know if 'return' is the right word for someone who left the Labour Party to form a new one (the SDP) that would be ruled by one-member-one-vote, only to ignore his own party's majority vote to merge with the Liberals in 1988.

Had he not done so, he would almost certainly have become leader of the new party, and would have spared Paddy Ashdown and the Liberal Democrats the disastrous (though temporary) consequences of continual backbiting from the Owenite rump SDP - not to mention the near-bankruptcy resulting from Lord Sainsbury's decision to divert his cash to the said rump (before bestowing it on the Labour Party).

Nor do I know if Owen's 'return' will include a speech at the Liberal Democrat conference next week. But I do know that, if it does, the audience shouldn't holding its breath for an inspiring performance.

Rhetorical Denial
Although David Owen was never a particularly brilliant orator, he was not only capable of using the occasional rhetorical technique, but also went in for what I've referred to elsewhere (see below) as 'rhetorical denial' (see below).

Dour though his delivery in the above clip (from an Ask the Alliance Rally in 1987) may be, he does at least manage to end it with a three part list.

Mark Pack reminds us of Owen's depiction of the SDP - with a rather neat alliterative contrast - as the 'tough but tender party'.

And he used another alliterative contrast at the start of the 1987 general election, telling us the 'reason not rhetoric will win this campaign.'

It didn't, of course, not least because Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock were still making powerful speeches at large rallies during that particular campaign (see previous post) - unlike the Alliance, which had opted for a new style of Q-A campaigning.

Hopelessly boring and uninspiring though it may have been, the Q-A format has, alas, become the dominant form media coverage of political communication in the UK.

On that basis, Owen may well have been ahead of his time. But it remains to be seen whether or not his 'return' will do any good for the party he so vehemently refused to join.

Related Posts
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Our Masters' Voices Then & Now

This morning, I was at Exeter University for the EPOP (Elections, Public Opinion & Parties) annual conference, where I gave a paper under the above heading.

In the not too distant future, I'll be posting a written version of it with a fuller story behind the video clips than it was possible to present in a 15 minute slot.

If you were there and would like to watch the clips again, here they are.

If you weren't, you might like to watch them anyway and guess what I might have been talking about - which, if you're a regular reader of the blog, shouldn't be too much of a challenge.


Since this appeared, the fuller story has now been posted HERE.
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Curtain imagery from Winston Churchill and John Major

Looking through video clips for a conference presentation, I came across one that I've often quoted as an example of how effectively a simple metaphor can be used to get a point across.

On being defeated in the 1997 UK general election, John Major had no choice but to resign as Prime Minister, but he was under no obligation to resign as leader of the Conservative Party.

But he did both and began his statement with the words:

"When the curtain falls, its time to get off the stage and that is what I propose to do."



I'd be very surprised indeed if anyone watching this responded (then or now) by asking "What curtain, what stage?" - let alone "What on earth is he talking about?"

Nor have I ever heard a similar response to the much more famous 'curtain' metaphor used by another recently defeated Conservative Party leader more than half a century earlier.

Having lost the 1945 general election, Winston Churchill, like so many of the prime ministers who followed him (e.g. Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown) embarked on the US lecture circuit in pursuit of a few dollars. At Fulton, Missouri in 1946, he spoke of an "iron curtain" that had "descended across the continent" of Europe (for more on which, see also HERE & HERE) :


Far from prompting those who heard it to start saying things like "What curtain?" or "I haven't noticed any curtains made of iron", the metaphor quickly became part of the vocabulary in the language of the Cold War.

Recycled images
These examples are neat illustrations of two rather obvious, but nonetheless important and intriguing, facts about imagery:
  1. Whether you use a metaphor, simile, analogy or anecdote, it can be one of the most effective ways of getting your message across.
  2. The same image (e.g. a curtain falling) can be used to get quite different messages across to different audiences.
This is why my book Lend Me Your Ears includes a whole chapter on the subject (Chapter 7: 'Painting Pictures with Words') and why I invariably use examples like these when running courses.

A dictionary of reusable images?
Having heard (and/or been involved in preparing) hundreds of speeches and presentations on a vast range of different subjects, I know that a "curtain falling" is just one of many images that can be reused effectively by different speakers for different purposes on different occasions.

As my collection of these continues to grow as the years go by, I'm beginning to wonder whether there might be enough of a market for them to fill another book, working title: An Anthology of Adaptable Images.
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Arabic speakers boo at names too!

"An imam leading the dawn prayer urged all Libyans to stand united and hailed the ousting of 'the tyrant Gaddafi', prompting jeers from the crowd at the mention of the former leader's name" - report about Libyans celebrating Eid on AlJazera's website earlier today (paragraph 4).

I was struck by this sentence because it represents the opposite of a technique for triggering applause that's described in my books as 'clap on the name'.

A prompt for boos & jeers too
I've noticed in other contexts, as when a crowd gathers on the pitch for the speeches and awards at the end of international cricket test matches, that naming one of the players (or umpires) quite often prompts booing and jeering.

So the fact that a name can prompt an identical response from an audience of Arabic speakers is something I'll be adding to my collection of evidence that there's something very general (i.e. cross-cultural) about the way in which audiences respond to different rhetorical techniques.

Related posts:
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777: 7 Kindle books, 7 pluses and 7 minuses

I've been a fan of Amazon's Kindle ever since signing a contract for digital versions of two of my books - when I discovered that the author's share of the royalties is about seven times more than the miserable 7.5% we get from sales of conventional paperback books.

Now, having just finished reading a seventh book on a Kindle of my own, I can report on the gadget from a user's point of view.

1. Pluses
  1. My main reason for getting a Kindle was that I found the print in a book I was trying to read so small that it was almost unreadable without a magnifying glass. By letting you select the size and type of font suits you, the gadget solves the problem at a stroke (and I finished reading the said book much more quickly than expected).
  2. The screen really does make it easy and comfortable to read for long periods - compared with those on computers, iPads, etc.
  3. Very portable.
  4. Long battery life between recharging.
  5. Good connectivity with a computer.
  6. Fairly easy to convert PDF and Word documents for reading on Kindle.
  7. Spectacularly fast downloads of books from Amazon.
2. Minuses
  1. Given the ease of reading via bigger fonts, it's odd that the colour and size of the Kindle's QUERTY keyboard makes it quite difficult to read and use, especially in poor light.
  2. It's difficult to stand it up on a table without it slipping down - why it doesn't have a lever on the back for propping it up at an angle (like many portable radios) is quite beyond me.
  3. No good for reading in the bath.
  4. Although you can search backwards and forwards, it's far more complicated than flicking through a proper book.
  5. Page-turning and other buttons make it too easy to press the wrong one by mistake and get lost and/or end up in the wrong place.
  6. Pictures, footnotes, bibliographies, etc. are grouped together at the end of Kindle books, which requires much tedious manipulation if you want to refer to them while reading the text. As a result, non-fiction books are much more trouble to read than fiction.
  7. I hadn't realised that, when reading a proper book, you're constantly monitoring how far you've got and how long it's going to take to get to the end. Kindle doesn't have page numbers, but does tell you what percentage of the book you've read so far. But, if it's a very long book 1% can mean as many as 8 pages of densely packed pages - which can be more demoralising than I'd realised.
3. Verdict
There may be as many minuses as pluses, but Kindle's supreme virtue (1.1) makes all the cons seem little more than minor irritations.

I do, however, think that Amazon should be trying to do something about some of the minuses, and especially those that would be so cheap and easy to fix (e.g. 2.1 & 2.2).
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Yvette Cooper's precisely timed response to a contrast from Ed Miliband

I noted a while back in a post showing how a member of the audience anticipated the answer to a rhetorical question by David Cameron that television editors are sometimes very helpful in providing detailed data on the interaction between a speaker and audience.

In that particular case, the camera switched from speaker to audience just before he delivered the answer to his question - with which a woman in the audience (on the left of the screen) was already agreeing before he actually got there (for more discussion of which, see HERE):


In the House of Commons, some members of the audience are routinely visible behind the person who's speaking, as in this next clip from Ed Miliband's speech in the debate about last week's riots.

What's interesting is that it shows just how quickly some listeners can and do respond when a speaker uses a rhetorical technique - in this case a contrast, with repetition and alliteration - to make a pont:

[A] To seek to explain
[B] is not to seek to excuse.

Yvette Cooper, behind his right shoulder, starts nodding in agreement before he gets to the end of the word "excuse" - at which point the MP sitting behind her starts to nod too:


In Our Masters' Voices (1984) I suggested that contrasts work to trigger applause (and other positive reactions) because the first part enables listeners to anticipate and identify precisely when the speaker reaches the end of the second part.

What I liked about this sequence, apart from Ed Miliband's neat contrast, was the way in which we can actually see Ms Cooper's positive response getting under way a split second before he's finished saying the word "excuse".

Foot note
This was also the first speech I'd heard from Mr Miliband since his nose operation and all the speculation about whether its real aim was to change his voice or to cure his sleep apnoea, which had made me curious to see if he sounded any different than he did before the operation.

As far as I could tell, his voice sounded exactly the same, but I do hope that the operation will have given his wife and children some relief from his alleged snoring - I say 'alleged' because I too am regularly accused of the same offence, even no one in the family has ever managed to produce any evidence (other than hearsay) in support of their complaints.
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Words of the week from a bereaved father


From the thousands of words written and spoken about this week's riots, these from Tariq Jahan, the bereaved father of a victim stand out as exceptional.

On YouTube, it's already been watched by about 100,000 viewers. Another 100,000+ have seen other versions of it and/or other statements by Mr Jahan on YouTube.

If you haven't seen it already, you'll find it as impressive and moving a two and half minutes as you could ever hope to see - and as time better spent than watching and listening to the hundreds of hours of reportage and 'expert' discussion on the media (e.g. on Newsnight) since the troubles began.
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Horrible historian David Starkey has also got it in for the Scots, Welsh and Irish


Editors of TV current affairs programmes believe, probably correctly, that guests who can be relied upon to say outrageous things are a sure-fire recipe for making their shows more entertaining - and may even help to increase their ratings.

Rentamouths
In reporting on this week's riots, BBC's Newsnight brought quite a few such 'experts' to our screens, including former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie and historian David Starkey.

Last night's performance by Dr Starkey (which you can watch in full HERE) set Twitter alight for a quite a while, with accusations ranging from claims that "he's a 'racist" to "he's bonkers".

I tweeted that I don't think he's 'bonkers' because it's difficult not to be impressed by the way he's managed to carve out a niche for himself as an all-purpose rentamouth. Like Mr MacKenzie, he can always be relied on to say controversial things that will shock, irritate or amuse a substantial proportion of any audience that happens to be watching.

For Starkey himself, an important spin-off of his 'celebrity' status is that he presumably sells far more history books than most professional historians.

Horrible historian?
As for how good a historian he is, I have no idea, as I've never read any of his books.

I also have no idea where he gets the idea that the English "don't make a great fuss about Shakespeare" (Question Time, 23 April, 2009), unless he went to a very different school than the ones most of us attended.

Nor am I convinced by his glib dismissal of Robert Burns as a "deeply boring provincial poet".

Whether or not his performance on last night's Newsnight exposed him as racist about black members of our community, the above clip shows that he not only thinks that it's jolly funny to make racist-sounding noises about the Scots, Welsh and Irish among us, but that he also revels in the boos and laughter his calculated insults attract.

Most depressingly of all, such 'entertaining' episodes inspire the editors of Question Time, Newsnight and other current affairs programmes to inflict him on us again and again and again...

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Cameron's "up & running" (twice in 50 seconds)



So far, the PM has had a good press on Twitter for his performance in the House of Commons today.

But, although my books and courses recommend certain forms of repetition, I don't think he gained much by using that over-used phrase from management jargon - 'up and running' - twice within 50 seconds.

If it isn't already on the #BannedList being compiled by the Independent on Sunday's @JohnRentoul, it surely ought to be.
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Long-winded Latin strikes again - and does it also make people speak louder?

After a short trip to Italy about eighteen months ago, I was so struck by the long-winded nature of Italian notices that I suggested that it might have a bearing on the widely-held belief that speakers of Latin-based languages make more extensive use of gestures than those of us who speak Germanic/Nordic languages (for more on which, see HERE).

Having just got back from a holiday in Sicily, I've already posted my most spectacular holiday snap (of Mount Etna smoking) of the week.

But here's the one that delighted me the most - not just because the notice was telling me not to do the very thing I was doing, but because it only took 3 syllables of English to translate 9 syllables of Italian.

As the previous post on the subject attracted some rather interesting discussion, it occurred to me that anyone who missed out on it might like to join in now.

Louder as well as more long-winded?
What's more, my casual observations from the past week, like standing in airport check-in lines and wandering around local markets, have prompted another thought about languages that require speakers to hold the attention of their listeners for a very large number of beats/syllables:

Does the long-windedness of a language also result in native speakers speaking more loudly, even to the point of shouting at each other during conversations, than speakers of languages like English?

Comments, as ever, welcome...
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Spectacular holiday snap & video of Etna erupting


Before going to Sicily last week, we hadn't realised what a spectacular view we'd have from the terrace of our friends' villa on the Gulf of Catania - let alone that Mount Etna would mark our arrival and departure by smoking as the sun set (above) defore spewing out red fountains 250 metres high and a river of lava running about a third of the way down the eastern side of the volcano.

For an early iPhone, the above picture of Etna smoking came out better than I'd expected, but my photographic equipment and skills weren't up to filming what came after the smoke. However, thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you don't have to worry any more about your own inability to capture such a memorable sight:

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Politically incorrect holiday interlude



Before going away, I usually try to post an interlude in the hopes that visitors might be tempted to return to the blog when normal service is resumed (in the second week of August).

With trouble still brewing in Syria and the EU struggling to solve the Euro crisis, the first two segments of this clip on Syrians and Belgians struck me as being vaguely topical.

And, if the first two targets don't remind you of just how politically incorrect Monty Python's sketches could be in the 1970s - before the concept of 'political correctness' had been invented - just wait until they get to their third and final target ...

Other Interludes:

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PowerPoint on radio and television revisited



A warm welcome to BBC Radio Scotland listeners who may have found their way here after listening to this morning's discussion of PowerPoint on MacAulay & Co.

If you'd like to know more about the Anti-PowerPoint Party, you can watch the president's video above and/or sign up to support it HERE.

There's a certain irony that this is not the first time I've been invited to discuss PowerPoint on BBC Radio or the BBC website - but not on BBC television - because other parts of the corporation, most notably BBC TV news and current affairs programmes, have been falling into the trap of broadcasting more and more slide-dependent presentations by reporters 'on location' at the other side of the studio (see links in section 2 below).

Visual aids or visual crutches?
The challenge of how to avoid inflicting death from 1,000 slides and make more effective use visual aids is something I've been teaching, writing and blogging about for years - and you can find out more about the subject from either of my two most recent books - both of which are available from Amazon in hard copy and/or downloadable immediately as Kindle editions:
Or, you can check out some of my other blog posts on the subject below, many of which are illustrated by short video clips:

1. PowerPoint:
2. TV news via PowerPoint:
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There's more to a novel name than meets the eye and ear

In calling their daughter 'Harper 7', David and Victoria Beckham are at the extreme end of a worrying trend that's been growing apace for at least a generation, namely the search for obscure names to inflict on unsuspecting new-born babies.

It's a practice that arguably has more to do with parental attempts to demonstrate their own startling originality than with the long-term comfort and well-being of their children.

Some friends of ours were recently getting very neurotic about the birth of a forthcoming grandchild because, had it been a girl, the parents were threatening to call her 'Nettle'. Luckily for everyone concerned, it was a boy, now safely registered as 'Edward'.

And by 'everyone' concerned, I include - at very the top of the list - the innocent victims who'll have to live with an unusual name for the rest of their lives.

Younger members of my family brand me as a 'name-fascist' when I advocate a statutory list of permitted names, along the lines of what used to apply in France. But they, of course, are too young to realise that it's only during their life-time that 'Max' has risen from nowhere to make it into the top twenty in some current lists of most popular boy's name - so it strikes them as being perfectly normal.

But, as I keep telling them, there's method in my madness that comes from experience.

MAX - a suitable name for cats, dogs, gangsters and cab-drivers
Apart from my maternal great-grandfather and grandfather (on whose birthday I was born, thereby giving my parents little choice in the matter), it was 36 years until I met anyone else called 'Max' - and he was an Australian.

Before that, it was a name exclusively reserved for cats, dogs and hamsters. The only partial exception to this was 'Maxie', who made occasional appearances being bumped off in the second reel of American gangster movies. Readers of the early Beano may also remember, though not as vividly as I do, that it featured a comic strip about a cab-driver called 'Maxy's Taxi'.

Do you really want your child to be singled out?
Apart from the slight irritation of being nick-named after a cartoon character, my name didn't bother me too much until I was shipped off to a prep school from ages 8-13. The headmaster called all the other 119 of the 120 boys by their surnames. He never explained to me (or anyone else, as far as I kow) why I was the only one in the school to be called by his first name, and can only assume that it must have been because I happened to be the only one there with such an unusual name.

I've no idea whether or not it did me any long-term damage, but I do know that I didn't much like being the only one who was singled out from the crowd in this way.

Do you really want your child to feel excluded?
Throughout my childhood, the thing that really bugged me about my name was its total and complete absence from the racks of monogrammed pencils, combs, mugs and other seaside souvenirs at Filey and Scarborough. Think what it feels like when you're the only child on the promenade with nothing whatsoever to choose from - I'd even have settled for 'Maxie', but that was never there either - while everyone else could chose pretty much anything they liked with 'David', 'Michael' or 'Richard' printed on it.

Times have changed
Today, of course, I'd have no problem in buying a pencil or comb with 'Max' on it - but the new problem is that grandparents are finding it more and more difficult to find souvenirs with their grandchildren's names on them.

In response to my grumpy old man's rants on the subject, the younger generation of parents tell me that obscure names have become so common as to be the new norm, which means that no one will notice them as being unusual any more.

For the sake of the new generations of children with novelty names, I just hope they're right.

As for those in the business of producing monogrammed novelties, the development of print-on-demand technology has presumably made it possible for them to cater for any imaginable combination of letters - and even, in the case of the new Beckham baby, numbers - that may be required.
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What went wrong with BBC Newsnight's latest attempt to involve a studio audience?

A couple of nights ago, BBC's Newsnight, advertised in advance as involving a live studio audience, attracted quite a lot of negative comments on Twitter, both during and after the programme. The main complaint was that the audience was rather unforthcoming and that even Jeremy Paxman seemed to be having trouble getting any of them to say very much about the phone-hacking scandal.

Never blame the audience
When things go wrong in a presentation or speech, my advice, like that of many presentation trainers, is never blame the audience - because there's no such thing as a bad audience. And I think the same goes for TV news and current affairs programmes that try to get an audience involved in a discussion.

In fact, on this occasion, I can even claim to have been wise before the event. After an earlier tweet from Newsnight on Wednesday, I'd tweeted: "Oh dear, @BBCNewsnight trailing 'live studio audience' tonight - expect hopeless chairing and zzzzz..."

This was based on having seen many such programmes, in which the presenter shows little or no technical appreciation of how turn-taking works and how the implicit rules change according to how many people are involved - and how someone's ability to perform in a TV interview is not unrelated to their experience of being interviewed (or lack of it) - for more on which, see Clayman & Heritage, The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

A multi-patched quilt
So what we got the other night was a patchwork quilt of a programme with far too many patches in it. In keeping with the modern myth that no one is capable of paying attention for more than a few seconds at a time, it kept switching at regular intervals between six quite distinct elements - of which the various attempts to involve the live audience, who were the only TV novices on the show, made up a mere sixth of the total:

1. Paxman + Newsnight political editor (1+1)
2. Paxman + cabinet minister (1+1)
3. Paxman + pundits (1+2)
4. Paxman + MPs (1+3)
5. Paxman + Audience (1+25)
6. Video footage from day's events.

The different colours highlight different sizes of group featured on the show - differences that inevitably involve different turn-taking rules - and depend for their success (or otherwise) on the participants, and especially the chair, having at least some tacit awareness of what they are.

The frequent flitting backwards and forwards between each of them made life difficult even for as experienced a presenter as Jeremy Paxman, let alone the inexperienced live audience. And, of all these permutations, ensuring effective turn-taking in such a large group is by far the most difficult.

Add to that the fact that the poor old audience kept being interrupted by cutaways to yet another few seconds of video film or by Paxman turning away to ask "what do you think, Danny?" and the attempt to pack such a miscellany of interviews, film footage and 'discussion' into 45 minutes, and is it any wonder that they came across as rather less than forthcoming?

I wasn't at all surprised that such such a format didn't work. But the last people I'd blame for that would be the audience in the Newsnight studio...
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Do journalists working for Murdoch feel like Peter Cook's take on working for Beaverbrook?


A couple of days ago, when I came across the video of Rupert Murdoch refusing to answer a question about the News of the World, I mentioned that I'd been searching YouTube for something else - that I'd been reminded of by recent events.

It was the above sketch from Beyond the Fringe in which Peter Cook describes what it was like working as a journalist for a press baron from an earlier age - Lord Beaverbrook, thinly disguised as 'The Beaver'.

Having tracked it down and listened to it again, I can't help wondering whether it strikes any chords with journalists working for the Murdoch media empire fifty years later...

P.S. I've just realised that this is the 800th post since starting the blog in September, 2008.
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Murdoch refuses to answer a question about the 'News of the World' on Fox News


As regular readers will know, I occasionally post interviews that strike me as interesting enough to share with a wider audience.

Today, while looking for something else on YouTube, I stumbled across this gem, broadcast about a year ago on News Corporation's Fox News (above).

The owner of the channel refuses to answer a question from one of his employees - whose deference towards his boss ("one of the biggest names there"; "Sir"; "No worries Mr Chairman, that's fine with me") is on a par with that shown by an interviewer from another age, who gave former prime minister Clement Attlee such an easy time more than half a century ago:


OTHER INTERESTING INTERVIEWS FROM MY ARCHIVES
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News of the World bows out by hacking into George Orwell - and misrepresenting what he said

The final editorial of the final edition of the News of the World began by making out that George Orwell was a fan of the newspaper. In case you missed it, you can read the whole thing, if you can bear its relentless hyperbole and self-congratulation, from a link posted below

July 10, 2011

"IT is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose and open the News of the World."

These are the words of the great writer George Orwell. They were written in 1946 but they have been the sentiments of most of the nation for well over a century and a half as this astonishing paper became part of the fabric of Britain, as central to Sunday as a roast dinner [my emphasis in red].
  • 'the sentiments of most of the nation for well over a century and a half '?
  • 'part of the fabric of Britain' ??
  • 'as central to Sunday as a roast dinner'???
Er - no, no and no!

I haven't ever seen - and can't think of - a single shred of evidence that would support any of these bizarre boasts - and you certainly won't find any if you read the rest of the editorial (HERE).

Plagiarism?
More intriguingly, the reference to Sunday roast dinner looks as though it was lifted from what Orwell said in the very next sentence after the one they quoted:

'... and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood...'

Was Orwell really a fan of the News of the World?
Even more intriguingly (or should that be 'even more typically/predictably'?), the editorial gives the impression that Orwell was a fan who was recommending the News of the World - and conveniently omits any reference to why he was planning to open the said newspaper:

'In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder...'

Nor, unsurprisingly, is there any mention of the fact that Orwell's interest was in murders that '... have been re-hashed over and over again by the Sunday papers...'

When I read the whole article by Orwell (see below), I was staggered at how appropriate it was that the News of the World's final editorial was such a fine example of the newspaper quoting someone so selectively, self-servingly and, fundamentally, misleadingly.

On this evidence, and as we'd have said when I was too young to be allowed to read the News of the World, it looks like a case of 'good riddance to bad rubbish.'

Yet, according to the surprising number of supposedly serious journalists who have devoted so much energy on Twitter bemoaning its passing, it seems that I may be missing something.

The article by George Orwell quoted in today's News of the World (from HERE)
'IT IS Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?

'Naturally, about a murder. But what kind of murder? If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and re-hashed over and over again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them. Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Dr. Palmer of Rugely, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs. Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson. In addition, in 1919 or thereabouts, there was another very celebrated case which fits into the general pattern but which I had better not mention by name, because the accused man was acquitted.

'Of the above-mentioned nine cases, at least four have had successful novels based on them, one has been made into a popular melodrama, and the amount of literature surrounding them, in the form of newspaper write-ups, criminological treatises and reminiscences by lawyers and police officers, would make a considerable library. It is difficult to believe that any recent English crime will be remembered so long and so intimately, and not only because the violence of external events has made murder seem unimportant, but because the prevalent type of crime seems to be changing. The principal cause célèbre of the war years was the so-called Cleft Chin Murder, which has now been written up in a popular booklet; the verbatim account of the trial was published some time last year by Messrs. Jarrolds with an introduction by Mr. Bechhofer Roberts. Before returning to this pitiful and sordid case, which is only interesting from a sociological and perhaps a legal point of view, let me try to define what it is that the readers of Sunday papers mean when they say fretfully that “you never seem to get a good murder nowadays”.

'In considering the nine murders I named above, one can start by excluding the Jack the Ripper case, which is in a class by itself. Of the other eight, six were poisoning cases, and eight of the ten criminals belonged to the middle class. In one way or another, sex was a powerful motive in all but two cases, and in at least four cases respectability—the desire to gain a secure position in life, or not to forfeit one’s social position by some scandal such as a divorce—was one of the main reasons for committing murder. In more than half the cases, the object was to get hold of a certain known sum of money such as a legacy or an insurance policy, but the amount involved was nearly always small. In most of the cases the crime only came to light slowly, as the result of careful investigations which started off with the suspicions of neighbours or relatives; and in nearly every case there was some dramatic coincidence, in which the finger of Providence could be clearly seen, or one of those episodes that no novelist would dare to make up, such as Crippen’s flight across the Atlantic with his mistress dressed as a boy, or Joseph Smith playing “Nearer, my God, to Thee” on the harmonium while one of his wives was drowning in the next room. The background of all these crimes, except Neill Cream’s, was essentially domestic; of twelve victims, seven were either wife or husband of the murderer.

'With all this in mind one can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader’s point of view, the “perfect” murder. The murderer should be a little man of the professional class—a dentist or a solicitor, say—living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery. With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer. Most of the crimes mentioned above have a touch of this atmosphere, and in three cases, including the one I referred to but did not name, the story approximates to the one I have outlined.

'Now compare the Cleft Chin Murder. There is no depth of feeling in it. It was almost chance that the two people concerned committed that particular murder, and it was only by good luck that they did not commit several others. The background was not domesticity, but the anonymous life of the dance-halls and the false values of the American film. The two culprits were an eighteen-year-old ex-waitress named Elizabeth Jones, and an American army deserter, posing as an officer, named Karl Hulten. They were only together for six days, and it seems doubtful whether, until they were arrested, they even learned one another’s true names. They met casually in a teashop, and that night went out for a ride in a stolen army truck. Jones described herself as a strip-tease artist, which was not strictly true (she had given one unsuccessful performance in this line); and declared that she wanted to do something dangerous, “like being a gun-moll.” Hulten described himself as a big-time Chicago gangster, which was also untrue. They met a girl bicycling along the road, and to show how tough he was Hulten ran over her with his truck, after which the pair robbed her of the few shillings that were on her. On another occasion they knocked out a girl to whom they had offered a lift, took her coat and handbag and threw her into a river. Finally, in the most wanton way, they murdered a taxi-driver who happened to have £8 in his pocket. Soon afterwards they parted. Hulten was caught because he had foolishly kept the dead man’s car, and Jones made spontaneous confessions to the police. In court each prisoner incriminated the other. In between crimes, both of them seem to have behaved with the utmost callousness: they spent the dead taxi-driver’s £8 at the dog races.

'Judging from her letters, the girl’s case has a certain amount of psychological interest, but this murder probably captured the headlines because it provided distraction amid the doodle-bugs and the anxieties of the Battle of France. Jones and Hulten committed their murder to the tune of V1, and were convicted to the tune of V2. There was also considerable excitement because—as has become usual in England—the man was sentenced to death and the girl to imprisonment. According to Mr. Raymond, the reprieving of Jones caused widespread indignation and streams of telegrams to the Home Secretary: in her native town, “She should hang” was chalked on the walls beside pictures of a figure dangling from a gallows. Considering that only ten women have been hanged in Britain this century, and that the practice has gone out largely because of popular feeling against it, it is difficult not to feel that this clamour to hang an eighteen-year-old girl was due partly to the brutalizing effects of war. Indeed, the whole meaningless story, with its atmosphere of dance-halls, movie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars, belongs essentially to a war period.

'Perhaps it is significant that the most talked-of English murder of recent years should have been committed by an American and an English girl who had become partly Americanized. But it is difficult to believe that this case will be so long remembered as the old domestic poisoning dramas, product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them.'

Other Phone-hacking related posts:

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With video evidence like this from News International, what are the police waiting for?


Establishing who in News International knew what and paid how much to whom for hacking which phones will presumably keep the police busy for quite a while. But why are they waiting to press charges against at least two of those who paid the police for information?

After all, this video evidence - legally obtained as they answered questions at a parliamentary select committee in 2003 - of CEO Rebekah Brooks and former News of the World editor Andy Coulson admitting that they paid police for information has been on the record for years.

At the time of writing this post, the above clip has been viewed 52,891 times on YouTube (up, interestingly, by more than 2,000 since yesterday) - and I find it difficult to believe that none of the viewers were officers of the Metropolitan Police.

So, if paying the police for information is illegal, how come neither of these people has been charged with committing the offence which both of them so openly admitted to all those years ago?
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