Senator Scott Brown shows how to use a newspaper as a visual aid

Scott Brown, the Republican who's just won the seat in the US Senate formerly held by the late Teddy Kennedy, has been hailed as an accomplished speaker - as in Bert Decker's blog under the heading New Communicator Bursts on the Scene.

His victory speech included another nice example of how effective it can be to use an object, even something as simple and mundane as a newspaper, as a visual aid (for more on which, see below the video clip).

It's interesting to note how quickly his holding it up in the air turns the chanting into cheers and applause, which then continue long enough for him to be able to complete a 360 degree circle before starting to speak again.

Notice also how the audience's reaction is finely coordinated with his movements - with the ovation starting to subside as he gets back to where he started from and puts the newspaper down on the lectern.

OTHER POSTS ON USING OBJECTS AS VISUAL AIDS:

• Objects as visual aids: Obama & Archbishop Sentamu in action
• Steve Jobs shows how to use an object as a visual aid (and how to speak about it)
• If Bill Gates doesn't read bullet points from PowerPoint slides
• No flies on Obama

Will the 2010 UK general election be the first one to leave us speechless?

This post was initially prompted by an invitation from Angela Definis to contribute to her latest blog carnival on the theme 'Public Speaking and the New Year', which has now gone live and includes links to seven other blog posts looking forward to 2010 (even if this one is dreading the prospect of the forthcoming UK general election!).

Regular readers of this blog will know that I find it quite depressing that the British media (aided and/or abetted by politicians themselves) show fewer and fewer excerpts from political speeches on their television news programmes.

Every night during the 1979 UK general election campaign, BBC 2 Television broadcast a half-hour programme called 'The Hustings', featuring excerpts from three of the day’s speeches - which I remember because it was where I first started recording (on audio-tape) the hundreds of speeches that eventually formed the basis of my book Our Masters Voices (1984).

When it came to the 1983 election, the programme was dropped and, by 1997 (and all subsequent UK elections), viewers were much more likely to see shots of politicians speaking in the background, with the all important foreground being dominated by a TV reporter summarising what the speaker was saying -- as also happened in BBC TV news reports of the Obama-McCain debates during the 2008 US presidential election (see 'Mediated speeches - whom do we really want to hear?').

So what?

My worry isn't just that it's not as easy to collect recordings of political speeches as it was when I first got interested in the subject (irritating enough though that is), but that the replacement of speeches by interviews as the main vehicle of political communication

1. lacks liveliness and is fundamentally boring to viewers,
2. makes for tedious television that, in the age of remote control, is all too easy to escape from by pressing a button, and
3. has contributed towards the increasingly dim view that the decreasing number of people who bother to vote have of politicians - who are most commonly seen evading the questions put to them.

But what baffles me above all is that British politicians themselves seem to have gone along with the media in downgrading the importance of speech-making - given that interviews hardly ever generate anything but negative news stories about the interviewees and/or the parties they represent.

That's why I began the 2010 by posting a summary of 'the Snakes & Ladders Theory of Political Communication', an argument that first saw the light of day after the 1987 general election.

As the election is getting nearer and nearer, it's worth repeating the question with which that post ended, namely:

Will 2010 be the first general election with no speeches, no rallies and no excitement?

Given the benefits that can come from making speeches to enthusiastic crowds (look no further than the success of Barack Obama's journey from nowhere), I remain completely baffled by the logic of our politicians’ apparent preference for doing endless interviews rather than letting us judge what they want to say and how they want to say it to audience at lively rallies.

After all, if you're going to play Snakes and Ladders, why on earth would you chose to spend all your time landing on Snakes and avoiding the Ladders altogether?

The answer, I fear, is that our politicians have fallen into a bigger trap set for them by a mass media that's more obsessed with increasing their control and decreasing their costs than they are with what audiences find boring or interesting about politics and politicians. Otherwise, how could anyone get so excited about the dreary prospect of lengthy televised election 'debates' between party leaders?

But accountants at the BBC, ITV and Sky News, of course, have every reason to get excited by the hustings being transferred to television studios. The fewer reporters and camera crews they have to send to film speeches at rallies around the country, the lower their costs will be - the net result of which looks like being the most tedious and boring election on record.

Fewer snakes and more ladders, please!

If I were still active in advising a political leader, I'd be urging him to ignore the new rules set by a misguided media and to get back on the road. And I don't mean just walking around a few schools, hospitals and shopping centres. I mean holding proper rallies, making inspiring speeches, creating some excitement and building some momentum.

The media would have no choice but to cover them, and the wider public would surely find them a bit more lively than more and more interviews in which we have to wait longer and longer, on the off-chance that someone will slip up and make it interesting enough to become news.

RELATED POSTS:

• Gordon Brown's interview technique: the tip of a tedious iceberg

• A prime minister who openly refused to answer an interviewer’s questions

• Why it's so easy for politicians not to answer interviewers' questions - and what should be done about it

• Why has Gordon Brown become a regular on the Today programme?

• Interview techniques, politicians and how we judge them

• Politician answers a question: an exception that proves the rule

• Did the media ignore Hannan because they think speeches are bad television?

• ‘The Lost Art of Oratory’ by a BBC executive who helped to lose it in the first place

• Is the media no longer interested in what goes on in parliament?

• Obama’s rhetoric renews UK media interest in the ‘lost art’ of oratory

Blogger video bug news (i.e. none)

Two days on and videos uploaded to Blogger (like most of them on this blog) still aren't working.

The collective frustration of the 73 (so far) who've managed to find somewhere to 'communicate' with Blogger's 'customer service' - quite a feat in itself - can be inspected HERE.

One that stood out for me offered a simple practical solution to the problem that they haven't acted on:

'Two days, blogger - pretty unacceptable. I assume the current video player is an upgrade gone wrong, 'cause I looked at some cached results on google and the old video player works just fine and still plays my old videos. In which case, why not reupload the old video player whilst you're fixing the current one? It's common sense really, rather than having tens of thousands people dissatisfied with your service.'

Another pointed to the only longer term remedy:

'this is a cruel but valuable reminder of the limitations of "free services".....Unless you pay for it, you cant own it!.Since none of us is paying for anything, we have no right,& most important,no value.....Instead of giving us all these "free services we don't need, why not charging us something that could provide quality and a minimum level of customer's attention and care?. I am too young & too proud to consider complaining, I am putting monies where my mouth is.....Moving to more friendly territories. Google is not the only platform for bloggers.'