My first professional speech was in the 1980s to 500 drunk travel agents at a golf dinner. I didn’t seek the gig. A desperate agent offered me £500 to replace her sick speaker at short notice. I wasn’t up to it but succumbed to financial temptation... And regretted it. After five seconds people started talking. After ten seconds, people booed. And after thirty seconds, bread rolls started to rain down on the stage. Where had I gone so disastrously wrong? I set about finding out.
I bought a book, The Complete Public Speaker by Gyles Brandreth. Not everyone cares for this former Tory MP’s style but he has been a top professional speaker for decades. His fees are in the thousands and he works constantly.
His first chapter was Audience Awareness. ‘You may not like the audience sitting in front of you, but remember: it’s the only audience you’ve got and your job – above all else – is to please it.’ I certainly hadn’t done that. I’d given my audience a few standard stories without thinking about their relevance.
A few years later I met Bob Monkhouse. Alternative Comedians of the 1980s had made him distinctly unfashionable but Monkhouse worked constantly on the corporate circuit. He kept thousands of gags on handwritten files, each one efficiently categorised. ‘You’ve got to tailor your stuff,’ said Bob. ‘Get to know company staff before a gig. Got a funny fat guy? Give them a fat guy joke. Got a loud-mouthed bald bloke? Give them a bald bloke gag.’ It helped that Bob’s memory was like a computer.
After my disastrous travel agents’ dinner I hit the ladies’ luncheon circuit and spoke at WI meetings. You don’t get drunken bread-roll-throwing here. But you can still fail your audience – as Tony Blair found to his cost. In June 2000 at a Women’s Institute National AGM, the Prime Minister was slow hand-clapped by thousands of normally polite WI members. He had served up political platitudes to what he had presumably assumed were naïve jam-makers. But WI members are a discerning lot – the organisation is a campaigning force – and they weren’t putting up with that. As TV opportunity turned to humiliation, the media master squirmed on his podium. It was a huge embarrassment for Blair who had totally underestimated his audience.
Of course, audience awareness, is only one element of a successful speech. Once you’ve got them sussed there are still other pitfalls (that can range from dodgy mics, dodgy nerves, forms of address and cue cards – to length of speech, inappropriate jokes and hecklers). But Brandreth starts his book on public speaking with the subject because it is the fundamental starting point.
Incidentally, many ladies luncheon clubs later, I did my second-ever all-male gig for Croydon Heating and Plumbing Society (CHAPS). They were sober. I survived. And the Croydon plumbers made me an honorary CHAP.
