Why does a government department force visitors to watch Sky News in silence?

If you want to get really steamed up about 'scandalous wastes of tax payers money', you can't beat spending a day or two in a government department - as I did earlier this week.

Needless to say, I'm not talking about the extraordinarily worthwhile benefits they gain from paying modest fees to external consultants like me.

What does concern and baffle me are the two gigantic flat screen television sets that were mounted side by side on a wall in the reception area. At first sight, you might think, it's a nice idea to deploy top of the range TV sets to provide some entertainment for visitors as they wait to be allowed a little bit further into the building.

Why silent movies?

But just what is the point of wasting money on two identical TV screens showing the same programme with the sound turned off?

Are they trying to improve their visitors' lip-reading skills, or is visual wallpaper some kind of subliminal protest against the ever-more prevalent scourge of piped music?

Why Sky News?

Then there's the question of why the viewing of choice from a government department should be Sky News?

If the idea is that their visitors might be interested in the ticker-tape 'breaking news' captions, why don't they show us publicly-funded BBC News 24, which would at least spare us from having to watch commercials funneling yet more cash into the Murdoch family's pockets?

Or is it a last feeble attempt by a dying government to persuade the owners of The Sun to reverse their newspaper's support for the Conservative Paty at the forthcoming general election?

Whatever the answer is to these perplexing questions, would you spend thousands of pounds of your company's hard-earned money on state of the art television sets for showing silent (news) movies to your visitors?

Financial regulators were 'party poopers'

Economics is a highly technical subject that can make it difficult for anyone trying to explain things like the recent financial crisis to a general audience.

The previous post showed Vince Cable, former chief economist at Shell, talking about it as a heart attack still in need of steroids.

Here's another economist who knows how to make the most of imagery. Talking about the origins of the crisis, Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz is explaining the origins of the crisis - when there was a party going on that got out of hand because the regulators didn't want to be 'party poopers'.

Like all imagery, it's not literally true, but the point comes across with force and clarity.

Some related posts on using imagery to get messages across:

• Rhetoric & imagery in Obama's victory speech
• Inspiring banking imagery for Budget day from Martin Luther King
• Imagery worthy of Obama in speech by the Governor of the Bank of England

Dr Cable's 'medical' diagnosis of our economic problems

I've just been doing some homework preparing a course for some high-powered economists next week.

At the heart of the brief I've been given is that they want get better at communicating complicated technical material to non-specialist audiences.

The search for suitable examples took me to my collection of clips from Vince Cable, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, about whom I've already posted quite a few examples and comments:

• Convincing Cable
• How to improve impact by sequence, repetition and a rhetorical technique
• 'From Stalin to Mr Bean: putting two parts of a contrast in the most effective order
• There's no such thing as a boring subject
• An important but elusive asset for British political party leaders

Part of what I wrote in the one on There's no such thing as a boring subject went as follows:

'On the subject of 'boring subjects', one of the interesting things on the British political scene in the recent past has been the rising esteem for the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, Vince Cable, whose star has risen on the back of his ability to sound as though he's talking more sense about complicated economic and financial topics than most of his competitors.

'However boring and incomprehensible such subjects may seem at first sight - or when coming out of the mouths of Gordon Brown or Alistair Darling - Cable talks about them with clarity and authority.

'And it's probably no coincidence that, unlike most of his political opponents, he's one of the ever-decreasing number of MPs who actually had a proper job outside politics before becoming a full-time politician.

'As chief economist at Shell, making economics intelligible to colleagues who weren't trained as economists must have been a routine part of Vince Cable's everyday working life - that has now, in his 'new' life, become his strongest 'political' asset.'

When it comes to making set-piece speeches, Cable is not the most brilliant exponent of the art, and his real forte is in unscripted Q-A sessions, whether on programmes like Question Time, Newsnight or in media interviews.

In this clip, after introducing the idea that the system has suffered a heart attack, he goes on to round off the point with a 3-part list - and it's worth remembering that his PhD was in economics, not medicine (or rhetoric):

CABLE: This was an enormous shock to the system - a big economic heart attack - so it's not surprising that a lot of damage has been done ...

[1] ... we've got a patient that's in intensive care,

[2] it's been rescued from a disastrous heart attack

[3] but it still needs the monetary steroids.

Some related posts on using imagery to get messages across:

• Rhetoric & imagery in Obama's victory speech
• Inspiring banking imagery for Budget day from Martin Luther King
• Imagery worthy of Obama in speech by the Governor of the Bank of England

The Orwell Award 2010: Request for help from readers

After fifteen months of blogging, I've just had an unsolicited email that's made it all seem worthwhile.

It's from the people who run the annual Orwell Awards, one of which is for a blog. It's open to anyone to submit their blog - so if you feel like submitting yours, you can find further details of how to do it and what they're looking for HERE.

Like all the other candidates, I'll have to submit ten of the things I've posted between 1 January and 31 December, 2009, which poses the problem of how to select a top 10 from the 319 posts that have appeared (so far) during the year.

HELP PLEASE!

As those of us who write are the least well-qualified to evaluate what we've written, this is where I'm hoping you might be able to help.

If you've seen any posts on the blog during the year that you can still actually remember, and/or that struck you as being particularly interesting, novel or consistent with the 'values' of the Orwell Prize (for more on which, see HERE), I'd greatly appreciate it if you could let me know which ones they were - either in the comments below or by email to maxatkinson(AT)speaking.co.uk).

And if you've time to refresh your memory and select a top 10, there's full list of links to everything posted on the blog since it started HERE.

Is there someone who doesn't want us to see 'Life After Death by PowerPoint'?

I've just discovered that an embedded link to a YouTube video on a post six months ago 'has been removed due to terms of use violation.'

This strikes me as being rather interesting, if only because I'd been writing about being under legal pressure to 'tone down' some of my comments on the pros and cons of PowerPoint before the publication of my book Lend Me Your Ears - and had pointed to this video as an example of something that was 'freely available on YouTube and, as far as I know, hasn't attracted any attention from Microsoft's legal department.'

The removal of the version on YouTube that I'd embedded suggests that someone somewhere isn't very happy about it.

But the good news is that, if you missed comedian Don McMillan's take on PowerPoint, you can still watch it by linking to YouTube from HERE or below:

Phone box becomes the world's smallest library and a worldwide news story

We've just had a visit from a German television crew, who've latched on to a story about our village that's been brewing for quite a few weeks - and has already been reported on as far away as Wells, Russia and Canada.

It all started at a tea party in the village square at the end of August, where a main topic of discussion was what to do with the phone box, which British Telecom had offered to sell to the Parish Council for £1.

Jan Fisher (interviewed HERE) came up with the idea of a book-exchange, as the travelling library no longer comes to the village.

So that's what happened and, as well as receiving a special award of £500 from BT, we've also received a huge amount of publicity (e.g. HERE).

Apart from being a nice example of how media outlets feed on each other for news stories, it raises a couple of intriguing questions.

1. Why has this seemingly trivial event attracted such widespread interest?
2. If I put my books in the book exchange, would it damage sales or work like a loss-leader and encourage readers to buy copies for colleagues, friends and relations?

Basil's book hits the headlines again

Basil catches up on the latest newspaper report about his school friends and new book, Basil's School Antics - a purrfect Christmas present for young and old, sponsored by Bristol Water in aid of Basil's village school and Water Aid.

Copies available (£4.99, including postage) from author Clare Blackmore (tel: +44 (0)1749 8704370 or email: cblackmore at educ.somerset.gov.uk) - and at least one copy to be won in our Christmas competition.