It is very well-known that technology can have a marked impact on how effectively speakers come across to an audience - as anyone who's ever been at a PowerPoint presentation knows only too well (see also HERE).
So a matter, if not the matter, arising from this year's party conference season is just how effectively do speakers come across when they pretend not to use a script?
Three 'scriptless' leaders
Because this year, we saw Ed Miliband repeating the feat of memory that worked so well for him last year, while Nick Clegg and David Cameron relied on huge teleprompter screens that were hidden towards the back of the audence - as did George Osborne, Jeremy Hunt and no doubt a few others .
Of the party leaders, Miliband showed us that he could indeed do it again and Clegg showed us (as I've long suspected) that standing at a lectern works better for him than wandering about the stage like a management guru.
But Cameron was more disappointing than usual, not least because he's a talented enough public speaker, whether speaking from a script or from memory, not to have to rely on such gadgets. You don't have to watch very far into the above to notice that his head and eyes don't always move in time together: his head sometimes turns slightly while his eyes stay firmly glued to the screen directly in front of him - rather like some of Margaret Thatcher's problems when she spoke from Autocue screens.
Where is the advice coming from and what's the evidence for it?
As has often concerned me about the BBC's obsession with PowerPoint style news and current affairs coverage, what gave them the idea that audiences like it and can they point to any research that actually supports such a claim.
So for Messrs Miliband, Clegg and Cameron (and their aides), I have a similar question or two.
Who has advised you that it's a good idea to be seen to be pretending not to have a script and have they shown you any empirical evidence that supports their claim. If so, what is it and where can I see it?
If not, why on earth are you taking any notice of their advice?
(P.S. And some questions for Mr Miliband: who thinks it's a good idea to have some of the audience behind you and do they have any evidence to support their claim? If so, what is it and where can I see it? If not, why are you taking any notice of their advice?)
Related posts
Did George Osborne get away with reading his speech from the back of the hall?
Gigantic screens at the back of the hall, big enough for speakers to read their scripts from, seem to be replacing more traditional teleprompters (like Autocue) this year.
The picture above was posted on Twitter earlier today by Paul Waugh during George Osborne's speech at the Conservative Party conference - and retweeted as follows by John Rentoul, who had presumably also noticed similar goings on at the Liberal Democrat conference:
"Very Nick Clegg RT @paulwaugh: Autocues in the audience for Osbo speech.. Helpful for any soundbites we miss."
This raises at least two questions that our politicians might like to consider.
- Do they really want comments on their latest gadgets to become a focus of attention for journalists?
- Does this technological gadgetry help them to improve the delivery of their speeches?
The answer to the first of these questions is presumably "No" - unless, of course, they're quite happy about reporters being distracted away from the content of the speech.
As for why this should be, I suspect that the technology and/or the script aren't in place soon enough for the speaker to get enough practice at using it before making the actual speech itself - for which he, his aides and the gadget operators would all have to make extra time when the hall was deserted..'
Some related posts on teleprompters:
- Cameron's too good a speaker to be following Mrs Thatcher into the teleprompter trap
- Thatcher had more teleprompter troubles than Obama
- Ronald Reagan's master class on how to cope when the teleprompter lets you down
- Delayed applause, poor speechwriting and delivery strike again in Osborne's speech
- Why doesn't anyone warn politicians about becoming Autocue automatons?
Lincoln the movie: 'too many words' and 'too American' for British ears?
Last night we went to watch the film Lincoln in our local village hall - and, as something of a speech and communications nerd, it was something I had been looking forward to for quite a while.
But, from a few minutes in, I found it increasingly difficult to get two rather negative thoughts out of my mind.
1. Too many words?
One was a memorable line from the film Amadeus, when Mozart is confronted by the complaint that his latest composition suffered from having had "too many notes." From discussions afterwards, I know that I wasn't the only person in the audience who thought that Lincoln suffered from having "far too many words".
Among other things, this had the effect, of making it the film too long. For example, when individual members of Congress started to vote on the crucial amendment one by one, I wondered just how many hundreds of these we were going to have to sit through.
2. Too American?
I'll admit that our village hall film shows do have a problem with the sound quality, so it was also a relief to learn afterwards that I hadn't been to only one there who had trouble hearing the dialogue. Leaving that to one side, however, there was something else that was difficult to get out of my mind - that I'd implicitly touched on in a recent presentation on on how well does English work as a common language.
This was the fact that differences between American and British culture may have ensured that Lincoln was unlikely to impress British audiences as much it had apparently impressed audiences on the other side of the Atlantic.
Before the film started, another member of the audience had already said to me "I don't know much about American history and I've really only come because I felt I ought to - I might learn something."
Too Ethnocentric for a British audience?
And here lies the rub. We Brits really know very little about the history of the USA, let alone its constitution or how it works.
We do know that they had the audacity to declare their independence from us, that they had a civil war that led to the end of slavery - though not the end of segregation (HERE) - and that they had opted to have a president rather than a monarchy.
But most of us know very little about the separation of powers between the legislative and executive arms of government, nor about the differences between the individual constituent states of the USA and the federal government - or the machinations between them that this gives rise to.
So for us, some of the basic assumptions at the heart of the film were at best culturally strange and at worst, completely foreign to us.
Vices & virtue as drama?
Apart from the characters of Lincoln and his family, it was never really made clear who everyone else was and we were left guessing who they were and which side they were on, whether in the ongoing debate or the civil war itself. All too often conversations sounded more like a succession of speeches or soliloquies, as when Mrs Lincoln had a row with her husband.
But, however unrealistic, unclear or plain boring the script might have been to British-English ears, the superb acting of Daniel Day Lewis not only deserved all the acclaim and awards that he received for it but was main thing that made it worth seeing at all,
Now we've had an Anglo-Irish actor making such an excellent job of playing a US president so soon after an American actress (Meryl Streep) apparently played a British prime minister (Margaret Thatcher) rather well, we may even be witnessing a promising trend that might actually bring our two cultures a bit closer together.
But that may depend on whether screen-script writers on each side of the Atlantic take note of the famous line that's widely attributed to George Bernard Shaw - England and America are two countries divided by a common language - but which he apparently never said...
Next open course on Speechwriting & Presentation. 10-11 October
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)