Pesky Peston?

One of the points made in my books on presentation and speech-making is that, when it comes to assessing others, we’re all wired up in much the same way, and that it’s difficult to see how human communication could work at all if we weren't.

So I’ve been intrigued to find myself on the receiving end of 3 completely unsolicited complaints about the presentational peculiarities of Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor.

The most outspoken one, which I’ve had to censor for publication purposes, went as like this: “As for that (expletives deleted) Robert Peston, all the training they must have poured into him still doesn’t make him any more coherent. I can do without the ‘y'knows’ and ‘errrrrrrrs’ and EMPHASIS where you're LEAST expectiiiiiing IT.”

Another said of him: ".. almost UNWATCHable as he seems to stress WORDS and syllables COMpletely at random without much regard for the meaning OF what he happens to be ON about – with similarly random upWARDS and downwards shifts IN intonation."

According to an article in the Daily Telegraph earlier this year (which you can inspect by clicking on the above title), he does at least seem to be aware that his “on-screen delivery lacks polish”.

But is that all? And does anyone else have any strong views on the matter?

ConVincing Cable

In the days of Paddy Ashdown’s leadership of the Liberal Democrats, his staff were always having to struggle, usually without much luck, to persuade the broadcast media to have any LibDem MPs other than Paddy on their programmes – which risked creating the impression that the party was a bit of a one-man band.

How things have changed now that Vince Cable is popping up all over the place, and seems to have become a regular on programmes like Newsnight and Question Time.

But he’s only the deputy leader, so what’s going on?

Is it just that, as former chief economist at Shell (and one of the ever-diminishing number of MPs who’ve ever had a serious career outside politics), he talks more sense about economics than most politicians?

Or maybe they're hoping he’ll come up with another gem like his ‘Stalin to Mr Bean’ quip about Gordon Brown.

Whatever the reason, it doesn’t strike me as being very good news for new leader Nick Clegg, who still needs to raise his public profile and could surely do with as much exposure as Vince is getting

‘Mature, grown-up and statesmanlike’ Cameron at the lectern

So David Cameron did stay at the lectern for his big speech - and won the instant accolade of being ‘mature, grown-up and statesmanlike’ in one of the interviews with the party faithful a few seconds after he’d finished.

But there’s still some room for improvement in his delivery. There were quite a few mis-readings of the script that had to be corrected as he went along. If, as seems likely, this was because he hadn’t had enough time to rehearse all the last-minute changes that were apparently made, the lesson is clear – late modifications are fine, but only if you leave enough time to rehearse the new lines.

He also did something I’d never noticed before, perhaps because it doesn’t happen when he’s doing a walkabout speech. In fact, it was a rather unusual form of ‘skewed’ eye-contact. It wasn’t that he excluded one half of the audience by hardly ever looking at them at all, as is likely to happen if you’re sitting to Gordon Brown’s right during a speech (see 'More tips for Gordon Brown'). What Cameron did was to alternate between one very long period looking one way and another very long period looking the other, with occasional glances straight ahead.

On average, it was about 20 seconds each way, which means that the rest of the audience was having to wait for about five sentences before they got another glance from their leader (see for yourself what it looks like by clicking on the title of this section, and go to video 4).

The most extreme case was one sequence when he spent nearly a minute and a half (about twenty sentences), looking continuously to one side, effectively excluding everyone on the other side (and in front of him) for a very long time indeed.

So my advice would be that, if he’s going to carry on using a lectern, he needs to work on alternating his glances much more frequently than he did in this speech, so that no one in the audience can complain that he’s ignoring them for unusually long periods of time.

As for why I think he’s doing it, I’ll leave that for another blog when I’ve got more time.

Cameron skewed gaze video: