B- for the Duchess of Cambridge's second speech (and/or her PR team)

After the Duchess of Cambridge's first speech (HERE), one of the comments on YouTube said: "Extremely annoying how she reads the script every 2 seconds, that was most likely written by her PR team."

But the overall consensus was that, for a first effort, it wasn't too bad at all.

Second effort though this one may have been, the rather carping comment above seems even more appropriate than last time - or at least raised a number of questions.

• Had she rehearsed the speech and, if so, how many times?
• How was the speech laid out on the two pages she was using?
• Why hadn't the height of the microphone been fixed before she started to speak?
• Had the sign in the background been properly secured?
• Why was there a gap on the left of the sign that allowed a police woman disguised as Princess Anne (and various other people) to peer out an distract the wider audience?

Or, to put it more bluntly, with the resources available to the royal households, why on earth don't they bother to get the basics right>

A silent Hillsborough apology from The Sun's current editor

Last night's TV coverage of the Hillsborough disaster report included what looked like a rather amateurish self-filmed statement by Dominic Mohan, the current editor of The Sun.

Curious to see it again, I looked it out on YouTube, but all that was there was this silent version of the said statement, raising the question of whether it could by any chance have happened by accident...

With sound
Since posting the above, I've tracked down the complete version on The Sun website - where the 'amateurish self-filmed' appearance of the above is explained: it was produced by The Sun for posting on their own website.

However, it still sounds as though it were hastily scripted or poorly rehearsed - or both. I'm also not very impressed by the fact that the Sun's current editor still seems to be trying to pass the buck to the South Yorkshire Police:

A classic of barnstorming speechifying from Jennifer Granholm, former governor of Michigan

Compared with some of the speeches he made in the run-up to the last presidential election, Barack Obama's acceptance speech at last week's Democratic Convention deserved little more than a B-.

I know this because BBC World got me to watch the whole thing and make a few comments on it the morning after he made it (and "few" was the operative word).

But there had been some quite startling speeches that were never seen on this side of the Atlantic, one of which was brought to my attention by my old friend John Heritage of UCLA, who's still keeping an eye on speeches and referred to this one as "a small classic of truly barnstorming speechifying!"

Mitt Romney's US = Unbearable Smugness

On the day of President Obama's inaugural speech in 2009, I blogged about a line I didn't want to hear in his speech (here):

"If there’s one thing that irks me about speeches by American presidents, it’s their tendency to overstate the case for their country being the first, finest or only example of freedom and democracy in the world."

And, to be fair, he obliged by avoiding any such extremes of smugness.

But there will, I fear, be no such luck if Mitt Romney makes it to the White House.

Having watched his acceptance speech a couple of times, I'm finding it difficult to decide which of the following I find more annoying: the fact that he uttered these lines at all, or the rapturous response they triggered from the audience:

"like all  Americans who went to bed that night knowing that we lived in the greatest country in the history of the world" (scroll in 9:40 minutes).

"When the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American." (Scroll in 10:20 minutes).

(See also: 'Mirror mirror on the wall, whose is the fairest democracy of all?')

Speeches in a common language for a fistful of voters?

If proof were needed of a point I made a while back - that actors, with the notable exception of Ronald Reagan, are often hopeless public speakers - look no further than Clint Eastwood's speech at the Republican Convention (above).

And, although I'm quite a fan of some US orators past and present (e.g. Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King and Barack Obama) my main reaction to what I've seen so far from Tampa has been "pass the sick bag".

Watching Mr Eastwood and Mrs Romney made me think that George Bernard Shaw was dead right when he said "England and America are two countries separated by a common language":