Hhhhmmm…… I’m writing this as I watch (on the TV) Gordon Brown PM as he addresses the Labour Party, here in the UK.
I’ve seen him live and been impressed - despite his reputation for being somewhat dour, he did a fine job (even quoting Ronald Reagan and getting away with it!). One of the reasons he managed this, of course, is that he understood his audience and he took the necessary time to build to the climax of the piece. It started with “where we are” and built on it nicely to a climax and a strong ovation from a thoughtful and convinced audience. This, needless to say, was not a televised speech.
Conversely, in this essentially tele-visual event, the current speech isn’t built like that at all. Instead it’s a series of sound-bites. Each - short - paragraph, structured to work when taken out of context. As a speech it’s awful: no flow, no structure and no pattern… just a series of short, self-contained (largely read) paragraphs. Essentially, Mr Brown is just reading a series bullet points to his listeners: their order is pretty well irrelevant.
But it works - sort of.
Not for his audience. For them it’s a getting a series of brief spurts of applause at the end of each paragraph - but they’re getting shorter and shorter each time, rather like the applause at a School Prize giving, when the list of children to be awarded prizes goes on and on and on, with each parent applauding their own child enthusiastically but only politely clapping twice for everyone else’s children.
But I’ll put money, good money, on the fact that when it’s cut up and edited for regurgitation on short news clips it works very nicely indeed.
Given that Mr Brown is obviously working for a TV audience, how could he have made it better? Well, for starters Mr Brown, if you’re listening, get away from the podium. Have the courage to get out from behind your autocue and connect better with your audience. I promise you the effects will be staggering.
You could, of course, just get a better speech-writer who can put in at least the semblance of linking between the paragraphs!
And you could combine these ideas, so that, for example, when you change topic you change place on the stage. That way, your audience will know when you’re doing so. Again, I promise you that’ll be more effective than you can imagine - simply moving to a different position on the stage as you change topic is fantastically effective… especially when your tone of voice and other presentation skills aren’t all that good. Already I’ve noticed a couple of times when you’ve not flagged up that you’re ‘moving on’ to something new, leaving your audience confused and struggling to keep up.
It’s simple oral grammar. By not flagging up when you move on, you’re doing the presentational equivalent of removing the full stops from a written document.
Finally, you might want to practice a little more. Yes, yes, I know you’re busy running the country, but this is part of running the country - it’s not something you do in your spare time. Three times (so far) I’ve seen you “obviously not know what’s coming” and get the inflection completely wrong… Once more confusing your audience for a few seconds.
It’s not rocket science. You can make a ‘good’ speech a ‘really good’ speech. That way, the good last 30 seconds (when you actually got excited about things!) would have been the standard, not the exception. That way, the standing ovation you’ve just got would have been genuine and deserved - not just because it’s expected (once again, for the cameras)!
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