REPEAT OF LAST YEAR"S POST ON THE GLOOMIEST DAY OF THE YEAR
If you find the darker afternoons that start tomorrow a depressing and pointless exercise, you might be interested in an article in The Times a few days ago (HERE for the full story from last year).
Apart from relieving the gloom, not putting the clocks back tonight would reduce electricity consumption by 1-2% and save NHS expenditure on dealing with accidents and emergencies:
“During an experiment 40 years ago, when British Summer Time was used all year for three years, there was an average of 2,500 fewer deaths and serious injuries each year. Opposition from Scotland contributed to the decision to return to putting the clocks back in winter.”
If putting the clocks back is such a big deal for the Scots, why don’t we let them do it on their own, especially now they have their own parliament in Edinburgh?
A different time zone in Scotland might be marginally inconvenient for the rest of us, but no more so than it already is when trying to plan meetings in other EC countries.
How rhetorical techniques work: an example from last night's Question Time
(Postscript on the 'star of the show' added on Saturday 24th October)
Part of the answer is because their structure provides listeners with implicit instructions that enable them to anticipate exactly when the speaker will finish - so that they can be ready to respond as soon as he/she gets to the end (in much the same way as we're able to know when to respond in a conversation without interrupting or leaving a potentially embarrassing silence before we start to speak).
So, once someone in an audience notices that a speaker has launched into a contrast, it's pretty easy for them to recognise when the second part of it comes to an end. Or, if you hear a rhetorical question, you'll know that that you'll be able to respond as soon as the answer is completed.
In this sense, audience responses like booing, cheering and clapping are collective versions of the individual turns we take when talking to someone in a conversation (on which there's much more in my books!).
It's not often that television editors let us see members of an audience visibly anticipating one of these completion points, though I've already posted a very clear example of a woman anticipating the answer to a question being posed by David Cameron (HERE).
On BBC Question Time last night, there was a similar example of a listener anticipating the third item in a three-part list as the person in front of her was putting a question to the leader of the BNP.
As he launches into his list, watch the woman behind him on the left, and you'll see her nodding in approval just as he starts the third item in his list - which is also exactly the point at which the applause begins:
Where do you want me to go?
This is my country
I love this country
I'm part of this country
(See also Why lists of three: mystery, magic or reason?)
P.S. AND HE WAS THE STAR OF THE SHOW!
Reading through some of the newspaper reports on the show, I was fascinated to see that this particular speaker was singled out in quite a few of them as the star of the show, as in this from The Guardian:
If there was a star of Nick Griffin's personal Question Time, it was not to be found on the panel of guests.
Instead it took a member of the audience to deliver a gift to headline writers across the globe and raise the loudest cheer.
Khush Klare, 38, whose parents emigrated from India in the 1960s, didn't plan it so. But as the microphone swung in his direction he heard himself asking Griffin: "Where would you like to me go? I was born in this country. I love this country."
However, it was his subsequent suggestion of a "whip-round" to send Griffin to the south pole – "It's a colourless landscape that will suit you fine" – that proved the undoubted highlight.
(see HERE for full Guardian report and interview with Mr Klare).
The reason this fascinated me is that the connection between effective speaking and the way the media selects and covers excerpts from speeches is something that has interested me for more than 25 years, and was a main focus in Chapter 5 ('Quotability) of Our Masters' Voices.
After recent posts on the effectiveness of 'surfing applause' by both Gordon Brown and David Cameron in their recent party conference speeches, it was great to see yet another example of surfing serving a speaker so well.
In the full sequence from Mr Klare's question below, you'll see that he follows an initial attempt to carry on speaking during the applause with a more determined effort as he continued towards the line about having a whip round to send the BNP leader to the colourless landscape of the South Pole:
How often do politicians watch television?
In the run-up to the BNP leader's first appearance on BBC TV's Quesion TIme later tonight, the Number 10 website had an interesting snippet about Gordon Brown's plans for the evening:
'Asked whether the Prime Minister was planning to watch Question Time, the PMS replied that the Prime Minister did not routinely watch Question Time.'
This reminded me of something I remember being surprised by when I was more actively involved in day-to-day politics:
however keen politicians might be to appear on the box, they didn't actually watch television very often themselves - not least because the timing of House of Commons proceedings meant that they wouldn't be able to see prime-time shows even if they'd wanted to.
As I'm not sure if my Betamax video recorder still works, I can't show you a gem from one of Mrs Thatcher's early Conservative Party conference speeches after becoming prime minister.
It was around the time that Heineken lager was running TV commercials (later banned because they claimed health benefits from drinking the stuff) that ended with the slogan "The beer that reaches parts that other beers can't reach".
My reason for thinking Mrs Thatcher had never seen or heard of the commercial came as she was thanking her cabinet ministers. Of Lord Carrington, the then foreign secretary, she said:
"He really is the peer that reaches parts that other peers can't reach."
The audience, most of whom must have been watching television often enough to be familiar with the slogan, loved it. But, as the laughter and applause got under way, Mrs Thatcher looked visibly surprised and said under her breath, and presumably with earlier arguments with speechwriters in mind:
"Oh - it did work then."
So I wasn't at all surprised to learn that Mr Brown doesn't 'routinely watch Question Time', and suspect that, like Mrs Thatcher and many other politicians, he hardly ever watches any television at all.
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