Effective broadcasters aren't always effective public speakers: the case of Melvyn Bragg

In his autobiography, the late Professor A.J. Ayer, noted that he'd been surprised to discover, when appearing long ago on BBC Radio's The Brains Trust, that broadcasting was very different from lecturing - in that it worked perfectly well for him and the other participants to speak at their normal conversational speed.

Last night, on the way out of Wells Cathedral after a lecture by Melvyn Bragg, I overheard a conversation between two other members of the audience that went as follows:

A: "There was too much to be able to take in."
B: "And he kept rambling off the subject with too many digressions."

I resisted the temptation to intervene with the strangers to express my complete agreement that he had indeed tried to cover far too much ground in a lecture that was also sadly lacking in structure and direction.

To these complaints, I would have added: "He also spoke far too quickly for a lecture, and especially one that went on for far too long" (i.e. 90 minutes).

Lecturing v. broadcasting
Bragg is, of course, a very experienced award-winning broadcaster - whose South Bank Show was seen as so crucial to London Weekend Television's franchise bid (after the 1990 Broadcasting Act) that he was one of a small group of staff who were paid multi-million pound 'golden handcuffs' to keep them with the company during and after the bid.

But, unlike Professor Ayer, he doesn't seem to have realised that lecturing calls for a rather different pace than broadcasting - not least because listeners are up against problem of trying to stay awake and pay attention to a far longer stream of talk than is ever the case in any of his television or radio programmes (or in everyday conversation, where the average length of turns at talk is about 8 seconds).

For radio listeners, eavesdropping on conversations, even intellectual ones like those on Bragg's In Our Time on BBC Radio 4, is easy enough. But he needs to learn that pausing much more frequently, and for much longer than you would ever do in a conversation (or on radio), is crucial to effective public speaking - and that includes lecturing.

In conversation, native speakers of English talk at a rate of about 180 words per minute, whereas the speed of effective public speakers is 120 words per minute (for more on which, see Lend Me Your Ears).

In this clip from a lecture by Melvyn Bragg marking Darwin's bicentenary at the Natural History Museum (where the acoustics sound remarkably similar to Wells Cathedral), the pauses are so infrequent and so short that his rate of delivery is just over 161 words per minute - i.e. much closer to conversational/broadcasting speeds than to the ideal for effective public speaking (longer version of video HERE):


Melvyn Bragg in his more natural broadcasting habitat
For comparative purposes, here's a clip of the conversational Melvyn Bragg interviewing Gore Vidal on the South Bank Show:

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Gaddafi as orator: a life in quotes - with thanks to Al Jazeera

Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, I've been a regular visitor to the AlJazeera website to keep up with the latest news.

Today, they've posted a collection of quotations from Gaddafi which make fascinating reading - not just in themselves, but because most of them are even more bizarre than any of the entries to the 'doomed dictators speechwriting competition' earlier this year.

Al Jazeera's post on Gaddafi's oratory:
As soon as Muammar Gaddafi seized power in Libya in 1969, at the age of 27, he launched into a perplexing and controversial career as a speech-maker that now spans more than 40 decades. In scattershot diatribes that at times stretched to several hours, Gaddafi astounded audience at Libya and abroad.

Famously dubbed the "mad dog of the Middle East" by Ronald Reagan, the former president of the US, Gaddafi did little to dispel that nickname in his wild orations and writings. In 1975, he outlined his political philosophy in "The Green Book" which carried the subtitle, ""The Solution to the Problems of Democracy; The Social Basis to the Third Universal Theory."

No matter how he is remembered by history, Gaddafi’s legacy as an orator is assured. Here are some famous Gaddafi-isms from his nearly 42 years in power:

"I am an international leader, the dean of the Arab rulers, the king of kings of Africa and the imam of Muslims, and my international status does not allow me to descend to a lower level."
— Remarks to a crowd including King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and having his microphone cut on March 30, 2009, as quoted by The Scotsman in the article "Gaddafi walks out of summit after attack on Saudi king" by Salah Nasrawi.

"There is no state with a democracy except Libya on the whole planet."
— Spoken at a conference at Columbia University in New York City on March 23, 2008.

"I am convinced that the [Israel-Palestine] solution is to establish a democratic state for the Jews and the Palestinians, a state that will be called Palestine, Isratine, or whatever they want. This is the fundamental solution, or else the Jews will be annihilated in the future, because the Palestinians have [strategic] depth."
— Interview with Al Jazeera, March 27, 2007

"If a community of people wears white on a mournful occasion and another dresses in black, then one community would like white and dislike black and the other would like black and dislike white. Moreover, this attitude leaves a physical effect on the cells as well as on the genes in the body."
— Excerpt from "The Green Book" (1975)

"[Abraham] Lincoln was a man who created himself from nothing without any help from outside or other people. I followed his struggles. I see certain similarities between him and me."
— Pulbished in The Pittsburgh Press on August 3, 1986, in the article "Gadhafi, the man the world loves to hate" by Marie Colvin.

"Irrespective of the conflict with America, it is a human duty to show sympathy with the American people and be with them at these horrifying and awesome events which are bound to awaken human conscience. When I was five, my brother was shot by an Israeli soldier, since then I have been dedicated to uniting the Arab countries throughout the Middle East and retain a trade flow with the West."
— Reaction to the September 11, 2001, attacks as quoted by CBSNews.com on September 12, 2001.

"All right, then nobody can complain if we ask pregnant women to make parachute jumps."
— Defending his belief that women's "defects" meant that their place was in the home as quoted by TIME on July 23, 1975.

"Libya is an African country. May Allah help the Arabs and keep them away from us. We don't want anything to do with them. They did not fight with us against the Italians, and they did not fight with us against the Americans. They did not lift the sanctions and siege from us. On the contrary, they gloated at us, and benefited from our hardship…"
— Interview with Al Jazeera, March 27, 2007

"There is a conspiracy to control Libyan oil and to control Libyan land, to colonise Libya once again. This is impossible, impossible. We will fight until the last man and last woman to defend Libya from east to west, north to south."
— audio message broadcast on Al-Ouroba TV, a Syria-based satellite station, on August 25, as oppostion forces began as assault on Tripoli.

Related posts on speeches in Arabic:

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A not very fantastic speech from Dr Fox














Resignation speeches tend to be at their best when a cabinet minister has taken the initiative to resign, as in the cases of Sir Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson and Robin Cook.

So I wasn't expecting much from the statement by the departing Dr Fox in the House of Commons earlier today. Nor did we get very much.

Beforehand, journalists on Twitter were getting very excited:
"Liam Fox just entered commons after govt chief whip Patrick McLoughlin scanned chamber" @nicholaswatt

"Fox has arrived" @paulwaugh

"Fox arrives. Sits on back bench" @MichaelLCrick

During and after the speech, they weren't impressed:
"Astonishing stuff from Fox. Apparently doesn't realise he's done anything wrong. It's all the evil meeja out to get him, right?" @dlknowles

"Fox has the brass neck to blame the media for his downfall." @ayestotheright

"If it weren't for the media, Liam, you wouldn't have been found out. A bit rich to have a go at us now." @MASieghart

"Too much like an Oscar acceptance speech"
This tweet, from @AndrewSparrow of The Guardian, summed the whole thing up - and with a nice touch of irony...

More reactions:
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Two engaging women speakers from British politics - and two models for powerful women?


During the Labour Party conference last month, I raised the question of whether some of the party's leading women, such as Yvette Cooper, Caroline Flint and Harriet Harman, are better speakers than the party's current generation of leading men.

Shirley Williams
On hearing the 81 year old Shirley Williams speaking at the Wells Literary Festival the other night - along the lines of the above from a similar speech she made at the Stratford-upon- Avon Literary Festival - I realised that there's nothing particularly new about effective women speakers holding their own with their male contemporaries and rising to the higher reaches of the Labour Party (and later, in her case, within the SDP and Liberal Democrats too).

Long before Williams and the three male members of the 'gang of four' had broken away from Labour to form the SDP, she had been a cabinet minister in the Wilson and Callaghan governments. And, from quite early in her political career, she was sometimes mentioned as a possible first woman Labour leader and even as a possible first ever woman prime minister.

Although these both eluded her, she's still not only a very engaging speaker, but also one who's retained an energy to rival many, if not most, speakers who are very much younger than she is. During her brief stay in Somerset this weekend, she was making speeches and taking questions from 1930-2130 on Friday night and from 0930-1130 and 1230-1400 on Saturday (i.e. for about 50% of the waking hours she was here).

As if that wasn't enough, she was planning to spend her train journey back to London reading a few more hundred pages of the health bill and its amendments in the current House of Lords debate in which she is playing a very active part.

Barbara Castle
Twenty years older than Shirley Williams was another leading figure in Harold Wilson's Labour government, the late Barbara Castle. I haven't been able to find any clips of her speeches on YouTube - where there seem to be more of Miranda Richardson playing her in the film Made in Dagenham than there are of the real Mrs Castle - but some of us are old enough to remember that she too was a much better than average public speaker.

Here's a typically assured performance from her in a TV interview from the early 1970s about the resignation of a defence minister and press intrusion in the private lives of public figures - a curiously topical coincidence to remind us that some issues are still making the headlines four decades later:


Castle, Williams and the Thatcher solution
In Our Masters' Voices and some of the blog posts below (especially HERE), I suggested that Margaret Thatcher had found a solution to the professional woman’s problem of being damned if they behave like a man and damned if they behave like a woman by being tough and decisive in her actions while being uncompromisingly female in her external appearance – and that this was summed up by the nickname the 'Iron Lady’, capturing as it does both 'strength' and 'femininity'.

In this respect, Barbara Castle, regarded in her day as being as tough, glamourous and well-dressed, came much closer to the Thatcher model for women politicians than Shirley Williams ever did.

The Williams alternative
At the time of writing Our Masters' Voices, I remember suggesting somewhere that Mrs Williams represented a rather different available role-model for women in politics than the one offered by Thatcher and Castle: the 'intellectual', ' blue-stockinged', 'untidy', 'verging on scruffy' stereotype of the female Oxbridge don (or Women's Institute lecturer).

As for whether she consciously developed such an image, there are at least two pieces of evidence that she is certainly aware of it in retrospect.

One is that she actually referred, without any prompting, to her erstwhile reputation for having untidy hair during the talk she gave on Friday night.

Clothes + fashion = frivolous waste of time peddled by supercilious saleswomen
The other evidence comes in the first chapter of her autobiography, Climbing the Bookshelves (of which I'm now the proud owner of a signed copy), where she reveals that she already had little or no interest in clothes and fashion by the time she was 10 years old. Comparing herself with her mother, she writes:

'... she did allow herself some moments of frivolity. She loved clothes and used to take me with her while she tried on the elegant polka-dotted silk dresses and emphatic hats of the 1930s. A new hat or pair of gloves could lift her spirit for days. It was a pleasure I did not share. After the first ten minutes of each encounter with a supercilious sales lady, I began to think about ponies and tricycles, and to resent the waste of my time. These early experiences immunised me against both shopping and fashion. For years I bought the first thing that looked even vaguely as if it might suit me, though often it didn't.'

Related posts

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Imagery can take us to the frontiers of science - via scissors, generals and sentinels

People sometimes tell me that it's all very well to bang on about the power of using imagery to get messages across (as in 'Painting Pictures with Words', Lend Me Your Ears, Ch. 7 and various other posts on this blog), but that it won't help much if you're speaking about technical subjects, let alone taking an audience to the frontiers of science.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as can be seen in this clip from a TED talk by Professor Peter Donnelly, FRS, telling us about "chemical scissors which cut DNA whenever they see particular patterns":


A few days ago BBC Radio 4's Material World (listen again HERE) included a discussion of the contribution made by Professor Ralph Steinman who died just before being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology. In this sequence, we're told that T cells act "as the generals of the army" and dendritic cells which "instruct T cells who to attack".

Interviewer Quentin Cooper picks up on "the generals in the army" analogy and suggests that dendritic cells are "almost like military intelligence". "Precisely", agrees the interviewee, before dubbing them as "sentinels for the immune system" and developing the point further...

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50 years of Private Eye: a story of retail, rejection and recognition

It's supposed to be a sure sign of growing older when you start thinking that police officers and doctors are getting younger. Another is when you realise that more and more significant anniversaries are taking place of events you think of as recent memories.

For me, the latest reminder of this is the news that it's 50 years since the fortnightly satirical magazine Private Eye was first published.

Not only do I remember it well, but I was also an early salesman and have been a subscriber and (very occasional) contributor ever since.

Retail
Selling the Eye outside university cafeterias was my first serious business venture. Lord Gnome had rightly seen students as a promising source of potential readers and had invited volunteers to join his sales force.

Once a fortnight, all I had to do was to go down to the station and collect my 6o copies of the latest edition, then priced at 1/6d (one shilling and sixpence, or 7.5 pence in new money) - for which I had to pay 1/- (one shilling, or 5 pence in new money) each, leaving a net profit of 30 shillings (£1.50 in new money) per fortnight.

These days, 75 pence a week may sound like a pittance. But when pubs sold a pint of beer for the equivalent of 7.5 pence, it was riches indeed.

Rejection
For years, I tried unsuccessfully to get Private Eye to publish my hilariously funny (?) cartoons, only to be bombarded with rejection slips suggesting that I should send them to Punch magazine (now coming up to the 10th anniversary of its demise in 2002).

I also rather regret that nothing I've written has ever made it into Pseuds' Corner, even though I know that such acclaim can have embarrassing consequences. Someone (and we haven't forgotten who you are) had successfully submitted a sentence from article about conversational turn-taking that one of my best friends had published in a learned journal.

When I told him that I was rather envious because nothing of mine had ever got into Pseuds' Corner, he warned of the dire consequences such recognition can have. It had been published a few days before he was due in Cambridge to serve as external examiner in a PhD viva. As he put it "they already think we're mad enough to be doing conversation analysis in the first place, without being able to rub it in by waving Private Eye at me before the meeting started."

Recognition
It wasn't until the mid-1980s that I finally managed to extract a cheque from Lord Gnome for a photograph that I'd taken of the village sign outside a village in Northamptonshire that bore the legend "Silverstone - please drive slowly."

Even then, it had seemed like another rejection for the many months it failed to appear in the I Spy feature, making me grumpier by the fortnight. Then, to give them their due, it turned out that they hadn't binned it after all, but had merely been waiting, with the journalistic flair we expect from Private Eye, to publish it the week before that year's British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

More recently, the Eye published another photograph I'd taken of a fly-posted planning notice from Mendip District Council - at a time when they were wasting unspecified amounts of council-tax payers' money on a campaign against fly-posting notices of forthcoming village events on 'items of street furniture', i.e. MDC jobsworthy jargon for telephone and electricity posts... (continued on p. 94).

Listen again: Lord Gnome aged 49 and 3 quarters - Michael Crick, BBC Radio 4 (8th October - for another 6 days).
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The End of Summer - with thanks to Steve Jobs & Flipron


At this time last year, I posted a video clip of audiences clapping out the conference season (HERE).

This year, I've produced a compilation of members of a conference audience listening in rapt attention (?) with musical backing from Flipron's The End of Summer (from their album Biscuits for Cerberus). Much admired for Jesse Budd's lyrics and Joe Atkinson's brilliance on the keyboards, this particular sequence neatly catches a suitable mood for marking the end of the party conference season.

And thanks to Steve Jobs - without whom...
When I bought my first computer in 1985, I came very close to buying an Apple Macintosh but chickened out and bought an Apricot (with two slots for 750K floppy disks).

About twenty years later, while staying with John Heritage in Los Angeles, I found myself being marched into the student shop at UCLA, where he made me buy my first MacBook.

Since then, I quickly upgraded to a MacBook Pro, have acquired a desktop MacPro and have been using an iPhone since the first week of its launch in the UK.

To expand on all the many virtues of being liberated from the familiar nightmares of using a Windows computer would be to risk a very long and boring blogpost. So suffice it to say that the incredible reliability and ease of using the iMovie program that's built into Macs has saved me thousands of hours in preparing demo clips both for lectures and courses and for posting as examples on this blog.

For example, preparing this particular movie - including retrieval of the music, selecting and editing the clips and aligning them with the backing - took less than half an hour.

And, as if that's not enough to be grateful to Steve Jobs for, he also stood out among CEOs as an extremely effective presenter from whom there was much that other business leaders could and should learn.

More from Steve Jobs:
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Cameron's too good a speaker to be following Mrs Thatcher into the teleprompter trap

A couple of years ago, I posted some video clips showing how Margaret Thatcher's speech-making became less effective when she stopped using hard copy scripts and started reading speeches from teleprompter screens (HERE).

A few months later, I realised that I'd been mistaken in thinking that David Cameron was having problems reading from screens - as it turned out that he wasn't using an Autocue or any other form of teleprompter at that time (HERE).

Cameron follows Thatcher down the same hill
But yesterday Mr Cameron had not only taken to using a teleprompter for his leader's speech, but was also encountering the same kinds of difficulties that diminished Mrs Thatcher's effectiveness all those years ago.

When using a script on a lectern, she would return her eyes to the text, clear her throat and close her mouth after making an applaudable point, leaving no one in any doubt that the time had come for them to get their hands apart. But, when reading from teleprompter screens, her head stayed up gazing into space, with the result that her applause rate fell dramatically (video examples HERE)

And there were some rather long sections in Mr Cameron's speech yesterday where the lack of applause was noticeably absent

Here you can see see two examples of him falling into the same trap as Mrs Thatcher . In both cases, he sets up what's coming as an applaudable point. But in both cases, nothing happens for so long (2-3 seconds) that he's already carried on again by the time it finally does - at which point he has to break off.

Also in both cases he seems to acknowledge the glitch with a slight nod, indicating, perhaps: "yes, it is your turn and you should jolly well have started a bit sooner than that"?.


Given that Cameron is more effective than most of his contemporaries at speaking from scripts on a lectern, I'd advise him to ditch the teleprompter forthwith.

Or, if his aides have cooked up some reason that's convinced him it's a good idea, they should also convince him that he's going to need a lot more practice if he's to get anywhere near his effectiveness with old-fashioned scripts (or, for that matter, with no script at all, as in the 10 minute speech that clinched the leadership for him at the beauty parade in 2005).

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Swim or sink with the president of the European Commission


Preparing for speechwriting course in Brussels this week, I thought it would be nice to include an example of a 'local' using some of the main rhetorical techniques in one of my demo tapes.

Such are the wonders of YouTube that it took less than a minute to find this little gem from the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, which had been singled out for replaying in a news report on his 'state of the union' speech:

REPORTER: He said Europe has to move forward towards matching its monetary union with a real economic union among its member states:

PUZZLE: This is Europe's moment of truth.

SOLUTION: Europe must show that its more than 37 different national solutions.

CONTRAST (with swimming metaphor + alliteration): We either swim together or sink separately.

Not surprisingly, this selection of key rhetorical techniques worked well enough for it to be singled out by the media as a sound bite - but it didn't impress everyone.

Guess who doesn't want to be seen clapping
British readers may be interested to see that, of the five MEPs shown just before Mr Barroso starts speaking, the only one who doesn't join in with the applause is none other than Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP (the UK Independence Party).

Whether or not you're one of his supporters or opponents, it has to be admitted that his behaviour here is admirably consistent with his long-standing antipathy towards the EU.
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Osborne finds the Tories more enthusiastic about the coalition than they were a year ago








A recurring observation on this blog during last year's party conference season was that audiences at the Liberal Democrat and Conservative party conferences were rather lukewarm about the coalition government they had just formed (see below). This was indicated by the fact that applause for mentions of it tended to be either delayed or failed to reach the 'normal' 8 seconds burst (or both) - e.g. HERE and HERE.

But in George Osborne's speech earlier today, there was evidence of a greater willingness among Conservative party activists to show their approval of the coalition than they were at this time a year ago.

When the Chancellor commended the Liberal Democrats for "working as a coalition together in the national interest" (about 30 seconds into the above clip) the audience not only started clapping more or less straight away, but they also managed to keep it going for a healthy 10 seconds.

P.S. Blimey!
Since posting the above, I've just discovered that the whole speech can now be embedded from the BBC website - so serious anoraks can now watch it from beginning to end:









Conference season 2011 blogging update:
Last year's conference season posts:
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The snake (interview) that did for Nixon's reputation and the ladder (speech) that had saved it



The Frost-Nixon interview as the ultimate snake
Was it, I wonder, pure coincidence that BBC2's schedule last night included some archive footage of the original Frost-Nixon interview (including the above), followed by the film version of the events surrounding and leading up to it?

After all, the party conference season, with its mix of extended interviews with politicians, very short clips from their speeches and much longer clips from media commentators telling us what they're talking about, has yet to grind to a close.

From my point of view, having started the season by asking why our politicians are so willing to play snakes and ladders under media rules that give them little chance of landing on anything but a snake (HERE), the chance to see the Frost-Nixon film could hardly have come at a more appropriate time.

Here was a disgraced American president who thought himself smart enough to run rings around a talk-show host and salvage his reputation - only to be lured into landing on about as damaging a snake as David Frost and his media colleagues could ever have dreamt of.

The Checkers speech as the ladder that saved his career
A quarter of a century earlier, claims that vice-presidential candidate Nixon might have misappropriated campaign funds almost forced his withdrawal as President Eisenhower's running mate.

What saved him was not an interview, but the carefully crafted 'Checkers speech' (still ranked as the 6th greatest political speech on the American Rhetoric website).

Interestingly, both the name it became known by and much of its powerful impact derived from a simple anecdote about his children and a little cocker spaniel dog.

I think our current politicians could do worse than to watch both - and reflect on what a single interview and a single speech did for Nixon's political reputation.

Were they to do so, they might think again about what, if anything, they are gaining from their tacit collusion with broadcasters about the relative merits of interviews and speeches as alternative ways of communicating their messages (and conveying positive/negative images of themselves) to a wider public.

(You may have to put up with a 15 seconds commercial before this starts).




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Are Labour's leading women better speakers than Labour's leading men?

I know that some of my Twitter friends, like @MarionChapsal of Geronimo Coaching, have an interest in collecting examples of powerful women speakers and leaders.

Having kept an eye out on both male and female speakers at this week's Labour Party conference, I thought that they and other readers might like to see three good efforts from women who spoke there.

For what it's worth, my general impression is that some of the party's leading women are way ahead of their male brethren when it comes to effective public speaking.

Why?
Is this, I wonder, because oratory is a dying art among males in a party that has seen former trades unionists, trained at the factory gates, give way to a new class of of Oxbridge educated young men trained as backroom boys for older MPs (and with little or no experience of having done anything much outside professional politics)?

Or is it simply that, even in a party so lacking in charismatic male speakers, women still have to be far better than average to get noticed and rise within the party?

YVETTE COOPER, Shadow Home Secretary:


CAROLINE FLINT, Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government:


HARRIET HARMAN, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party:


Postscript
On reflection, and at the risk of offending Msses (if that's the plural of 'Ms') Cooper, Flint and Harman, it occurs to me that they arguably all have something in common with Margaret Thatcher when it comes to solving the problem of becoming a 'charismatic woman' (see HERE). That particular post concluded as follows:

'... one of Mrs Thatcher's major long term achievements may turn out to have been the undermining of age-old assumptions of the sort contained in Quintillian's observation that the perfect orator cannot exist ‘unless as a good man'. And, by finding a workable solution to the problem of being damned for being like a man and damned for not being like a man, her combination of uncompromising femininity with equally uncompromising words and deeds may have laid the foundations for a new tradition within which women politicians of the future will be able to operate' (derived from Our Masters' Voices, 1984, pp.111-121).

Conference season 2011 blogging update:
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Did the BBC change its mind on publicising the snake Miliband landed on yesterday?



If this blog's main theme during last year's party conference season was the way in which audiences failed to applaud things that they should have applauded, this year's is turning out to be the snakes and ladders theory of political communication - which proposes that, for politicians, speeches work like ladders (by bringing them good news), whereas interviews work like snakes (by bringing them bad news).

Ed Miliband's memory lapse 'exposed' in a BBC interview
As I was driving for about six hours yesterday, I spent much more time listening to the radio than tracking the blogging and tweeting from the last vestiges of the Labour Party conference.

But the car radio obliged - as an example of how a gaffe in an interview can generate embarrassing news for a politician, they don't get much better than Ed Miliband's failure to name one of his party's candidates in the campaign for the Labour's Scottish leader - which was headlined on the early evening news programmes from BBC Radio 4.

By the time I got home, the internet was awash with the news. By 9.17 p.m., Mark Pack had embedded the original clip from the BBC website on the Liberal Denocrat Voice blog (HERE).

A change of heart from the BBC?
But when I tried to do the same earlier this morning, I was thwarted.

Yes, you can still watch the clip on the BBC website, but you can no longer access the code needed to embed it on your own blog or website - which is why I've had to 'make do' with embedding the version posted on YouTube by Guido Fawkes (that's already been seen by about 5,500 viewers).

When it first became possible to embed clips from the BBC website, I welcomed it (HERE). Since then, however, how they decide which ones are allowed to reach a wider audience (by giving access to the embedding code) has remained a complete mystery.

Today it's become be even more mysterious than I thought. After all, why, having supplied the code for embedding this particular clip last night, has the BBC withdrawn access to it this morning?

If they've done it in response to complaints from the Labour Party (who else would want to restrict its accessibility to a wider audience) we could be witnessing an even more worrying form of collusion between broadcasters and politicians than I suggested we're already up against in Politicians & broadcasters: collaboration or capitulation?

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Why did Labour members boo and clap when Miliband mentioned Tony Blair?









News last month that a Libyan crowd had been booing on hearing the name 'Gaddafi' prompted me to note that Arabic speakers apparently boo at names too.

Little did I think that we'd soon be hearing some members of a Labour Party conference audience booing while others clapped on hearing the name 'Tony Blair'.

Not content with announcing "I am not Tony Blair", Ed Miliband went on to make another rather obvious point: "I am not Gordon Brown either" (no response).

Then, with what struck me as an air of frustration and perhaps even desperation, he asserted "I am my own man and I'm going to do things in my own way" - 16 seconds of applause (i.e. twice as much as a normal burst).

Who writes stuff like this I do not know. Whether it was Miliband or his speechwriters, one has to ask whether it really didn't occur to any of them that the lines might just possibly (or should that be 'certainly') be singled out and played at the top of BBC Television's Ten o'clock News (as indeed they were) - or that, barely half-hour later, Sadiq Khan, the M.P. who led Ed Miliband's leadership campaign would be reminding us of these very same words (with apparent pride) in an interview with Kirsty Wark on BBC2's Newnight.

What did the booing and clapping mean?
Having watched the above clip quite a few times, I'm still fascinated by the ambiguity of these simultaneously negative and positive audience responses.

Were those who booed indicating that they were sorry to hear that Ed Miliband is not Tony Blair, or that they were pleased to hear him distancing himself from Tony Blair?

Were those who applauded indicating that they were pleased to hear that Miliband is not Blair, or that they were still fans of Blair?

Whatever the answer, an obvious alternative interpretation was to treat it as evidence of division in the party about its past, present and future - which, as a communications strategy, is about as effective as bowling a full toss for the media to hit for six.

Hunt the split
Although British broadcasters may have largely lost interest in showing clips from speeches during news programmes (see the last few posts), they won't miss the possibility of reporting splits in a party if there's so much as a hint of division. That, after all, has been the leitmotif of media coverage of politics for decades.

So what better way to do it than to focus on Mr Miliband's determination to distance himself from his two immediate predecessors, with the added bonus of showing footage of party members booing and applauding the name of the most successful leader they've ever had.

Can Labour afford to back the Ed Milibandwagon?
On asking this question during the Labour leadership campaign last year, I attracted a bit of flak for daring to suggest that Ed Miliband might be too young to remember what had actually happened to his party during its 18 years of decline and recovery between 1979 and 1997 (HERE).

His recurrent rubbishing of New Labour may have helped him to win that particular campaign.

If this speech is anything to go by, he still seems to think there's mileage to be had from continuing to bite the hands that fed him the promotions without which he would never have become a credible leadership candidate in the first place.

But for me, his speech was a reminder of what I'd written about him more than a year ago: maybe he really is too young to know what he's talking about.

If he isn't, I'm left with little or no idea about what he really stands for or what he's trying to tell us about the direction in which he plans to take his party.

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Stand-up comedy from Ed Miliband



Is it a good idea for political leaders to have a go at doing stand-up comedy?

As regular readers will know from a post at the start of the conference season, I'm all in favour of viewers being allowed to hear more from the horses' mouths, so that they can draw their own conclusions about what they think of competing politicians - without having to depend ever more heavily on interpretations from media reporters and commentators.

But, although I do have a few thoughts about the above sequence from the opening of Ed Miliband's leader's speech at the Labour Party conference a few hours ago, I'm more than happy to let you reach your own judgements about it...

Conference season 2011 blogging update:




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Andrew Neil plays snakes & ladders with Ed Balls before picking up a scalpel









Last night, after watching The Daily Politics show on BBC2, I posted a couple of tweets on Twitter that would hardly have come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog:
  1. "Just watched @afneil 'review' of #Lab11 - i.e. pitifully short extracts from speeches + long/boring interviews."
  2. "If I were Ed Balls, I'd think twice about playing such a long game of snakes & ladders with @afneil"
The tweets, of course, reflect my concern about the way in which British politicians seem to have conceded control of political communication in the UK to the broadcasting media - by going along with the latter's preference for devoting more and more airtime to interviews and less and less to excerpts from speeches, even though interviews seldom deliver anything other than bad news and negative impressions of politicians (for reasons explained in more detail HERE).

A new weapon: media autopsies of media interviews
The diversification of communication in the digital age means that celebrity media interviewers can now carry out their own post-mortems on their own interviews to search out any errors an interviewee (or should that be 'victim') might have made while walking so obligingly along the tightrope prepared for them by the all-powerful broadcasters.

If it then turns out that the politician did indeed land on a snake in the just-completed game of snakes and ladders, the interviewer can start tweeting and blogging about it to their heart's content.

Balls goes under the reporter's knife
And so it was, after the interview was over, out came the pathologist's report, starting as follows (full version HERE):

"I interviewed Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls on the Daily Politics Conference Special on Monday, live from Liverpool, the moment he'd finished speaking to the Labour conference.

"In the course of our usual robust exchange, which we both enjoy, he made a couple of claims that I knew I would have to investigate more thoroughly. And I have! ..." (continued: HERE).

A clearer dividing line between comment and reportage?
I concluded Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation? by explaining why I think the changes that have been taking place matter:


'..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.'

If ever such a debate does get under way, another question we should be also be asking is: how worried should we be if the dividing line between between media reportage and media comment is becoming progressively more blurred?

Conference season 2011 blogging update:

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Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news









In his speech at the Labour Party conference earlier today, shadow chancellor Ed Balls had a go at 'surfing applause' (about 2.45 minutes into the above clip), a technique that's seldom mastered by anyone outside the top rank of political orators (for more on which, with examples from Tony Benn and presidents Obama and Sarkozy, see HERE).

Could this, I wonder, have had anything to do with prompting some rather favourable reactions on Twitter, such as this from @ JohnHigginson: 'Talk from the faithful is that Ed Balls, who has always suffered from a stutter, is becoming better at delivering speeches'?

I also can't help wondering whether it was deliberate and, if so, who taught him to do it?

But don't expect our broadcasters to let a wider audience see it on prime-news tonight. After all, that would mean giving Mr Balls far too much airtime and prevent the likes of Nick Robinson, Tom Bradby, Adam Boulton et al. from spending even more time telling us what he was talking about (for more on which, see HERE).
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A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions


The latest edition of the News Quiz on BBC Radio 4 included a perceptive analysis of Nick Clegg's use of rhetorical questions during his speech at last week's Liberal Democrat conference.

Exaggerated?
Yes it is.

Should the BBC be broadcasting this kind of stuff?
Yes it should.

Is this the kind of show that makes the licence fee worth paying?
Yes it is.

Can you listen to the whole programme again?
Yes you can (for another six days HERE).
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Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses


PLUS
Having grumbled previously about Nick Clegg's past attempts to imitate David Cameron's walkabout apparently unscripted style of delivery, I was delighted to see that he stood at a lectern for yesterday's speech.

If you want to look more like a statesman than a management guru, that's the way to do it, even if you do forget to pretend that you're reading from the hard copy text in front of you.

MINUSES
1. Faces in the background
Fashionable though it's become for our party leaders to make speeches with some of the audience sitting behind them, I cannot for the life of me see what the point of it is.

During the 1992 election, John Major took to speaking in the round and, if I ever manage to unearth my videos of people yawning and dozing in the background, I'll certainly post them on the blog.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, party leaders used to speak from a platform, surrounded by colleagues all around them - until, that is, Harvey Thomas (former impresario for Billy Graham's UK crusades) got involved in staging Conservative Party conferences, where Mrs Thatcher was set apart from the rest so that any signs of audience dissent or doziness couldn't be seen by viewers at home.

Neil Kinnock quickly followed suit - and with very good reason. I have another video from one of his earliest leader's speeches, in which Dennis Skinner and Joan Maynard (aka 'Stalin's aunty') sat behind him eating sweets, shaking their heads and generally looking very cross.

There may not have been any such damaging distractions from those who sat behind Mr Clegg yesterday, but the possibility was always there.

Nor did it do a very good job in accomplishing the only defence for it I've ever heard, namely to demonstrate the ethnic and gender diversity of the party's supporters. I could only see one black face and not as many female faces as there should have been.

2. An unfortunate contrast
The power of the contrast in the armoury of rhetorical devices available to speakers was strongly evidenced by the fact that Clegg's recurring "not easy, but right" line was widely noticed and reported by the media as the leitmotif of the speech.

But, given the alternative meanings of the word 'right' in the English language, and especially in the world of politics, it hardly seemed an appropriate choice. If you're suspected by some of your supporters (and enemies) of selling out to go into coalition with a right-wing party, 'right' is, at best, an ambiguous word to use in such a context- and that too was spotted and has been commented on in the media.

Whether or not this was deliberately intended by Clegg and/or his speechwriters, I do not know. But I'd have gone for a safer option like "not easy, but necessary", "not easy, but unavoidable" or "not easy, but no choice."

On the other hand, if speeches have become as unimportant in UK political communication as I suggested in the previous post, maybe none of this nit-picking matters very much at all...

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