I've blogged before about politicians - including President Obama and Ed Miliband - using teleprompters, reading from scripts, speaking without scripts, pretending not to have a script, modelling management guru walkabouts, etc.
In his leader's speech yesterday, Mr Miliband excelled himself by forgetting some crucial lines from the script he had tried to remember. Although his last two efforts to memorise scripts more or less verbatim were hailed by the media as great successes, the last thing you want is for journalists and their editors to concentrate on how you said something rather than what you actually said (or didn't say).
And here lies one of the hazards of 24 hour news and the reporting of speeches before they are actually spoken. If Mr Miliband had not circulated the text of his supposedly scriptless text-free speech, he might have got away with it. But he did not and has had to spend the day reading reports of what he had not said, appearing in broadcast news interviews trying to explain his omissions away, etc.
If I were asked, my advice would be to say that there's little to be gained from trying to memorise long speeches - unless you happen to be David Cameron performing in a 10 minute beauty parade for the Tory party leadership...
Why is champagne traditional for smashing on ships?
The Queen will smash a bottle of whisky on the hull of the new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth in a break from the traditional champagne. But how did champagne become the tradition, asks Lucy Townsend.
When Queen Victoria launched the HMS Royal Arthur in 1891 she smashed a bottle of champagne against it. It is believed to be one of the first instances of the drink being used in this way.
"It was a very prestigious warship with a royal name so champagne would have seemed fitting, it's a celebratory drink, but before that it had been the tradition to use [other] wine," says John Graves, curator of ship history at the National Maritime Museum.
Launching a ship has always been accompanied by ceremony. The Babylonians would sacrifice oxen, while the Vikings sacrificed a slave to propitiate their sea god.
Wine became customary in England in the 15th Century when a representative of the king would drink a goblet of wine, sprinkle wine on the deck and then throw the goblet overboard.
"It would have been much cheaper to smash a bottle," Graves adds.
"In the 18th Century the Royal Navy launched so many ships that throwing a silver goblet overboard each time would have become very expensive - so they started using bottles.
"It's quite a clear progression. The red of the wine would have looked a bit like the blood from earlier centuries, and the move to champagne would have been all about the celebration - champagne is the aristocrat of wines."
In the US, whiskey has been used in the past - the USS Princeton and the USS Raritan were launched using whiskey in the 1845 and 43.
In 1797 the captain of the frigate USS Constitution broke a bottle of madeira wine to mark her launch, while in 1862, Commodore Charles Stewart christened the New Ironsides in Philadelphia by smashing a bottle of brandy over her bow.
"During prohibition water was used in the US to launch a ship," Graves adds. "It would be water from the sea the vessel was to be launched into."
But champagne is now the drink smashed against most ships - though Graves adds that there may be a better alternative.
"I have been told by many ship builders that cheap cava creates a more spectacular display - it's much bubblier that champagne."
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