Beware of mobile phones and 5-part lists

If you're looking for sample clips of how not to do it, go no further than the BBC Parliament Channel during the party conference season - if you can bear to sit through one dire speech after another.

Its apparently random editing as the picture switches from speaker to audience also throws up the occasional gem - or maybe it's not so random, but is deliberately done to show that some people in the audience have more important things to do than hanging on the speaker's every word.

Tonight I spotted this one, which highlights a problem with mobile phones that's all too familiar to those of us who regularly speak in public.

It also illustrates the kind of response you're likely to get if you're rash enough to use a 5-part list (i.e. none) and the fact that using an autocue doesn't guarantee a brilliant delivery.

Not the LibDem Conference – BBC website news

The title of yesterday’s post ‘Not the LibDem conference in Bournemouth’ was not intended to imply that the Liberal Democrats are not holding their annual conference there this week, but to highlight another conference in the same town.

But if I had anything to do with LibDem communications, I’d be very worried indeed that there isn’t a single reference to the conference in the top 11 stories being headlined on the BBC website a few moments ago, which gave the following stories higher priority than anything going on in Bournemouth:

• Attorney General is fined £5,000
• Killer mother jailed for 33 years
• Autism rates back MMR jab safety
• Police clear French migrant camp
• Baggott to 'take police forward'
• Building companies fined £129.5m
• Rape victims treatment reviewed
• Airlines plan 'to cut emissions'
• UK rivers failing new EU standard
• 'Open internet' rules criticised
• Gilbert the whale dead on beach

I’d also be quite worried by the results of yesterday’s poll about their leader’s recognisability (also from the BBC website):

'More than one third of British people have not heard of the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, a poll conducted for BBC Newsnight suggests. The 1,056 UK adults canvassed were asked for their opinion of him. Thirty six percent had a favourable view of Mr Clegg, but an equal number said they had never heard of him.'

Nor is this the first time that media coverage of the LibDems (or lack of it) has got me wondering whether the party has a communications department at all (see also HERE and HERE).

However, as this is a 'non-aligned' blog, my interest in the problem is entirely 'academic'.

Claptrap 5: In the right places at the right times

This is the fifth in a series of posts marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Our Masters' Voices and the televising of Claptrap, which you can watch HERE.

Part 2: Eureka! is HERE
Part 3: News leaks out of the lecture theatre is HERE
Part 4: How to get a book published is HERE

If a chance meeting on a Croatian beach had broken the deadlock of 22 rejections slips (Claptrap 4), another similar encounter resulted in Our Masters’ Voices being promoted to a much wider audience than expected.

How it happened and where it happened made it difficult not to believe that fate was working in mysterious ways – as it’s unlikely that any of it would ever have happened if I hadn’t been a research fellow at Essex University more than fifteen years earlier.

Another chance meeting

I mentioned in Claptrap 4 how easy it had been to get academic books published during the 1970s – so easy, in fact, that my PhD thesis had been published, more or less verbatim, by the Macmillan Press (Discovering Suicide, 1978).

Although I knew that sociology students, from ‘A’ level to universities, were all required to know about Emile Durkheim’s classic Le Suicide (1898), it hadn’t occurred to me there was therefore a market for secondary reading on the subject, especially if it was cheeky enough to question the methodology of such a famous founding father of the discipline.

One result of this was that some of my earliest publications had penetrated as far as the ‘A’ level syllabus. A spin-off from that was that I found myself being invited to speak at sixth form conferences, where bus-loads of reluctant school children were treated to the dubious pleasure of listening to some of the authors whose work they were supposed to know about.

At one such conference, I bumped into someone I’d known from when I was working at Essex University. By then, Ivor Crewe (left) had become a professor in the department of government, and his work on elections meant that he too was getting invited to speak at sixth form conferences.

When I told him about the clapping research, he became interested enough to ask me to send him some samples of what I’d written so far – which I did.

An invitation to meet the media
A few months later, he invited me to speak at one of the most fascinating conferences I’d ever been to. In those days, Ivor Crewe and Tony King used to organize a weekend at Essex University on ‘Political Communications’ during the most recent general election campaign.

They were planning the one on the 1983 election, which was scheduled for the early spring of 1984. A paper from me comparing the performances of Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot during the campaign, they thought, might give a novel angle on their usual proceedings.

What made their conferences so different from all the other academic conferences I’d ever been to was that it wasn’t just attended by academics, but also attracted people from politics, the media, opinion polling, etc. So speakers at that first one I attended included Cecil Parkinson, fresh from presiding over Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory, Austin Mitchell, M.P., Robin Day and Peter Snow from the BBC, Gus Macdonald from Granada Television, Bob Worcester from MORI, representatives from the advertising agents used by the main political parties - as well as leading academics from politics and government departments around the country.

The mood of these conferences was best summed by the delegate who told me that what newcomers had to understand about them was that all the academics there wanted to be on the media and all the media people there really wanted to be academics.

'Opening Pandora’s box'
As no one there knew who I was, let alone anything about this still unpublished research into clapping, the comparison between Thatcher and Foot depended on my starting off with a selection of introductory video clips illustrating the main rhetorical devices that trigger applause in speeches.

Before the session was over, two notes had been passed up to me at the front. One was from someone asking for a copy of (the yet to be published) Our Masters’ Voices to review in his column in The Times. Another was from someone asking me to go on his TV show.

By the end of the weekend, people were saying that what I’d shown them had been like watching someone opening Pandora’s box, and I’d been approached by five different producers and/or presenters about my work being featured on five different television news and current affairs programmes.

It was as if the media interest in that first lecture I’d given a few years earlier (Claptrap 3) had suddenly started to explode. It also reminded me of the secret vow I’d made not to go on television again until I’d published a book on the subject.

A kindred spirit?

Of all the media people I met at the conference, the one who intrigued me most was Gus Macdonald (right), who was then still with Granada.

It wasn’t just his unusual background – a former ship builder from the Upper Clyde with little in the way of a formal education – but he was the only person there who’d spotted that there might be a connection between what I was doing and the work of one of my heroes, Erving Goffman. Gus, it turned out, was a Goffman fan too and one of our meal-time conversations must have made those nearby wonder what on earth we were talking about.

I was also intrigued by his parting words as we were all leaving. He shook me firmly by the and said “Don’t sign up with any of these other bastards until you’ve spoken to me.”

There’d been no promises and no hints about what he might have in mind. But he sounded so emphatic and decisive that I couldn’t get his words out of my mind when some of the ‘other bastards’ did start phoning a few days later (on which more in Claptrap 6).

Coincidental domestic footnote

The Essex post-election conferences eventually became part of the EPOP group of the Political Studies Association. One of the co-organisers of the last one I went to was my son, Simon Atkinson, who has worked for MORI (now IPSOS-MORI) for nearly twenty years.

Bob Worcester, the founder of MORI, assures me that no nepotism was involved in his appointment. Sociologists who know of my early diatribes against survey research and quantitative methodology will find this very easy to believe - and will no doubt appreciate the irony of my having a son who was to became a senior manager of the UK's leading polling company.

EARLIER BLOG POSTS ON APPLAUSE INCLUDE:
• Obama on Kennedy got more applause than ‘normal’
• Thatcher had more teleprompter troubles than Obama
• How to stay awake during a repetitive ceremony
• Disputing the meaning of applause
• Rhetoric wins applause for questioners on BBC Question Time
• Applause for Dimbleby’s questions on BBC Question Time
• Obama’s rhetoric identifies with Martin Luther King but appeals to a wider audience
• Obama’s inauguration rhetoric won approval for some uncomfortable messages
• Rhetoric and applause in Obama’s inaugural speech as a measure of what the audience liked best

Not the LibDem conference in Bournemouth

Before last week, I'd only ever been to Bournemouth to attend LibDem annual conferences - and I haven't done that for at least 10 years.

But I did go to another conference in Bournemouth on Friday, the first Annual Conference of the UK Speechwriters' Guild, whose founder, Brian Jenner, is to be congratulated for making it possible for about fifty people with this apparently esoteric interest to spend a day together.

One of the most fascinating talks was by Phil Collins, former speechwriter to Tony Blair, who had an interesting and plausible line on the main theme of the conference, 'Why is there no British Obama?' - which he developed further by explaining why he thinks it unlikely that there will ever be a British Obama.

But for speechwriters, one of his more interesting revelations was about the difference between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in their approaches to speechwriting.

Blair was not only a good writer (as we've all known since long before he became leader of the Labour Party) who wrote quickly and effectively with a fountain pen, but he also understood the importance of using other people's material as well.

The more computer-literate Brown apparently prefers DIY and makes little or no use of material from other writers. In stead, he's continually composing, reworking and storing his own lines about different subjects on his hard disk, and then cuts and pastes different sections according to whatever his next speech is going to be.

For me, this shed interesting light on some of the comments I've posted over the last year, and especially those bemoaning his tendency to pack far too much information and far too many numbers into his speeches (see below).

If he had a better understanding of the importance of keeping things simple, or listened to and/or used speechwriters who do, this might be less of a problem for him.

And, in the unlikely event of his still having to give so many speeches at this time next year, he might pick up a few helpful tips if he came along to the second annual conference of the UK Speechwriters' Guild.

• Gordon Brown’s G20 address ignores an important tip from Winston Churchill
• How many numbers can you get into a minute?

Open course on speechwriting

Anyone interested in coming to one of my speechwriting courses might like to know that the next open one is being held on 2nd November at the National Liberal Club in central London.

The programme and booking details can be seen HERE.

Gordon Brown tries out a 4-part list at the TUC

Well, Mr Brown's now given the speech that had been widely circulated before he got anywhere near the TUC in Liverpool.

And here's what Sky News singled out as the sound bite of the day - because the much trailed news was that he was going to say the word 'cut' for the first time.

In fact, he used the 'C' word four times in a row, deploying a curious combination of rhetorical techniques that I've seldom seen before: a fifth item being contrasted with the previous four (very different from the much commoner form, favored by speakers like Churchill and Obama, where the third item is contrasted with the first two).

Nor did it seem to go down all that well, as there was a significant delay before the applause finally got under way - prompted, it appears, by Mr Brown leaning back from the lectern to let them know that he jolly well wasn't going to go on until they responded.

(You may have to watch an advert or two before GB comes into view).

Edmund Stoiber: A charismatic Bavarian?

Whilst running a course last week, I met a German who asked me if I’d heard about Edmund Stoiber, former premier of Bavaria, who's well known in the German speaking world for his incoherent speeches and frequent faux pas.

As I hadn’t, he’s kindly sent me a specimen from YouTube with English subtitles, that, as you can see HERE, makes George W Bush and John Prescott sound like amateurs in such matters.

All of which prompted me to find a bit more by typing ‘Edmund Stoiber+gobbledygook’ into Google - which quickly came up with the following background information (fuller version is HERE):

The gentleman that he is, Stoiber was going to compliment German Chancellor Merkel on her tough stance against US President George W. Bush. But that's where things got a little complicated.

"I found it refreshing," Stoiber said, "that the Chancelor criticized Guantanamo in front of US President Brezhnev."

US president Brezhnev? Hello, Bavaria, this is earth speaking! What was Edmund Stoiber thinking when he mixed up Bush – himself a master of the Freudian slip – and Brezhnev – a man who loved vodka as much as communism?

He's done it before

Stoiber is known for not always saying the right thing. The country is laughing to this day about the time he addressed Sabine Christiansen – the people's princess of German political talk shows – as "Frau Merkel."

Admittedly, not all of his faux pas were equally entertaining. The entire population of eastern Germany, for instance, was not in the least amused when Stoiber – during the 2005 election run-up – called them "the frustrated ones" and said he was not leaving the country's fate to them.

Stoiber has raised his inability to form complete sentences to the level of rhetorical bravado. One of his speeches about the transrapid railway system, for example, has inspired numerous music geeks to remix his staccato gobbledygook into a musical and poetic firework that became an instant success on the German-speaking internet.

Very few politicians get to have their speeches set to cheap techno or German rap. But Stoiber is not like other politicians. He could easily make the transition from Herr Prime Minister to MC Kool Dawg Eddie and land a contract with a major record label, without even trying.

Hilarious stuff that gets you wondering what other gems we students of rhetoric and communication in the English speaking world are missing out on because of our linguistic incompetence.