Gordon Brown's interview technique: the tip of a tedious iceberg

Yesterday, Iain Dale posted a plug for a new book about handling media interviews and included the following observation (by Dale) about Gordon Brown (or 'Boredom Frown', as my granddaughters prefer to call him):

“Gordon Brown has catchphrases he uses over and over again. Whatever the question he’s asked he’ll come out with the same five catchphrases. Someone should tell him people are getting bored. They know what the answers are going to be. He doesn’t seem to have the ability to think on his feet in the way that Blair did. He doesn’t come across well in interviews like Blair.’

I think Brown’s problem is even more serious than this. More than 20 years ago, I heard the late great Robin Day complaining that the TV interview had been hijacked by politicians. In the good old days, he said, interviewers could have a really good argument with the likes of Harold Macmillan, who would perk up at the prospect of engaging in serious debate - whereas now (i.e. more than 20 years ago), they just treat questions as prompts to say anything they like about whatever they like.

If you missed one of my postings on this theme last September, here’s part of what it said:

In an age when coverage of speeches makes up an increasingly small proportion of broadcast political news, Brown’s supporters might offer the defence that dourness on the podium doesn’t matter as much as it did in the past. But even if there is some truth in this, the trouble is that their hero has a second, and arguably even bigger, handicap in the way he conducts himself in what has become the main cockpit of political debate on television and radio, namely the interview.

For at least two decades, viewers and listeners have had put up with the sight and sound of politicians treating interviewers’ questions as prompts to say anything they like, regardless of what they were asked, or as yet another opportunity to dodge an issue. As an exponent of how to carry this depressing art to its limits, Gordon Brown has no serious competitors among contemporary British politicians. When he was still shadow chancellor, one commentator noted that if you asked him what he had for breakfast, his most likely response would be ‘what the country needs is a prudent budget’ – and that would merely be the preamble to a lecture about his latest thoughts on the matter. I recently asked one of the BBC’s most experienced and best-known presenters what it was like to interview him. His answer was rather more outspoken than I’d expected:

"Brown answers his own questions, never the interviewer's, and is utterly shameless. He will say what he wants to say and that's it. And he'll say it fifty times in one interview without any embarrassment at all. I've never met anyone quite like him in that respect. I once spent 40 minutes on one narrow point and still failed to get him to make the smallest concession. He's extraordinary and is never anything but evasive and verbose."

If politicians like Brown think it clever or smart to get one over the interviewer with such tactics, they betray a staggering lack of sensitivity to two rather obvious and basic facts about the way people interpret verbal communication. The first is that viewers and listeners can tell instantly when interviewees are being evasive. And the second is that they don’t much like it. Politicians may say that they’re worried about their low esteem in the eyes of the public and growing voter apathy. But it never seems to occur to them that their relentless refusal to give straight answers to questions might have something to do with it.

The fuller story can be seen HERE.

Eye contact, public speaking and the case of President Zuma’s dark glasses


Having just watched Jacob Zuma being sworn in as South Africa’ new president (HERE), I was reminded of the importance of eye contact in holding the attention of an audience.

It wasn’t so much that he hardly looked up from the text, which was excusable given that the importance of getting the words right when reading out an oath, as the fact that he was wearing dark glasses at all.

Readers of my books will know that I regard some of the widely circulating claims about body language and non-verbal communication as being at best over-stated, and at worst false (e.g. see Lend Me Your Ears, Chapter 11). But eye-contact is definitely not one of these.

In fact, here’s what I wrote about the subject twenty-five years ago that bears on the case of President Zuma'a dark glasses:

‘.. humans are the only primate species in which the irises are framed by visible areas of whiteness, and it is generally considered that the evolutionary significance of this has to do with the communicative importance of our eyes: the whites of the eyes make it relatively easy for people to track even slight movements over quite large distances. An illustration of the importance of eye visibility for holding the attention of an audience is provided by an anecdote in the autobiography of the Oxford philosopher, A.J. Ayer (Part of My Life, 1977). He reports that, after sustaining a black eye as a result of bumping into a lamp post during a wartime blackout, he took to wearing dark glasses. He goes on to say that he subsequently found when lecturing in them that it was quite impossible to hold the attention of an audience. Given his reputation as an effective speaker, this suggests that the invisibility of a person's eyes can seriously interfere with his ability to communicate with an audience. It may therefore be no coincidence that there have been very few great orators who have worn spectacles, even with plain glass in them, when making speeches.’ (Our Masters’ Voices, 1984, pp.89-90).

There’s much more on why eye-contact is so important for effective public speaking in Lend Me Your Ears (pp.36-43), but an additional point about President Zuma’s choice of dark glasses is that it tends to make him look more like a South American dictator than a democratically elected president, an implicit association that he would presumably be quite keen to avoid.

All of which is to say that, if I were advising him, I’d definitely tell him to get some new glasses.

I'd also suggest that his aides should pay a bit more attention to camera angles and back-drops, because there's someone just behind him wearing a black bowler hat, the brim of which at times pokes out from the sides of the president's head - a seemingly trivial point perhaps, but I bet I'm not the only viewer who found it distracting.

Chicago!

A few days ago, I logged on to Expedia to book a flight from Detroit to Chicago, from where I was due to fly back to Heathrow. It didn’t take long and all seemed to go very smoothly - until, at Detroit airport, I discovered that I should have taken a bit longer and taken a bit more care.

So here are a couple of helpful tips for anyone who might ever have to book an internal US flight to Chicago and/or have the misfortune to fly out of Terminal 5 at O'Hare airport.

1. Unknown to me until yesterday, there are two big airports in Chicago, and I'd mistakenly booked a flight from Detroit to Chicago Midway to catch a Virgin flight to Heathrow. But Virgin flights go to and from Chicago O’Hare. Luckily, it’s only a 45 minute shuttle bus ride between the two of them and, even more luckily, I’d allowed so much time that I didn’t have to get into a serious travel flap. So, if you are booking a flight to or from Chicago, make sure you check which airport you need.

2. New and flashy though it may be, Terminal 5 at O’Hare must be the only airport in the world that has no restaurants, and precious little in the way of bar and shopping facilities, once you’ve passed through the security checks. The facilities are so minimal (a few mobile market stalls on wheels), that there’s no coffee or tea available, not even from a machine. Even more annoying is the fact that there are no notices warning you of this irritating fact before you start taking your shoes off and putting your other potentially hazardous belongings through the X ray machine.

So the moral of this part of the story is that, if you ever do have to pass through this miserable place, feeling a bit peckish or in the mood for some retail therapy, make sure you get it done before you go through security - though even then you'll still have the added stress of trying trying to work out whether you've allowed enough time to eat something, go shopping and get through the security checks before your plane leaves.

Weatherization

Reading an American newspaper today has taught me a new word, and it's another long one, to add to my collection.

Home weatherization seems to refer to what we British speakers of English know as home insulation.

A lot of dollars are being dished out to help people to do something about it - an optimistic sign, perhaps, that the new regime is taking global warming a bit more seriously than George W. Bush, whose position on the subject made about as much sense as Thabo Mbeki's ridiculous HIV/AIDS denial policy.

Notes from a large continent

After a relaxing weekend in Los Angeles enjoying perfect weather and good company, I’ve just arrived in Ann Arbor, where I’ve got to do some work at the University of Michigan.

Apart from noticing a few more long words (see previous posting) – like ‘ground transportation’ for what we Brits would be more likely to call ‘buses’ – what immediate impressions so far?

One is that everyone I’ve come across so far is very positive about the Obama presidency in a way that harks back to the early days of the Blair premiership in 1997. This is particularly so among academics, who are getting quite excited by the fact that the new president’s economic stimulus package is going to pump a few billion extra dollars into research that they hadn’t been expecting.

Another is that the word ‘pandemic’ seems to be preferred to ‘epidemic’ in much the same way as in the UK, just as the news networks are spending a lot of time finding out that not a lot seems to be happening.

On the streets, the curious thing is that the only people I’ve seen wearing face masks seem to be the Japanese, which I find quite intriguing because there were quite a lot of Japanese wearing face masks on safari in Kenya when we were there in February. When I asked our Kenyan driver what they were worried about, he said that they seem think the air in places like the Masai Mara is seriously polluted, which it isn’t.

I can see that there might be more of a case for protecting yourself against pollution in LA or Detroit, but haven’t a clue whether it’s that or flu that’s worrying them and am, of course, far too polite to ask them.

Are there more longer words in American English than in British English?

One thing that's often struck me about American English is that long words quite often seem to be preferred to shorter alternatives that are more likely to be used by British speakers of English.

One example I've heard in the last half hour is 'elevator', when Brits would go in a 'lift'. Another is 'expiration', when we woild settle for the shorter 'expiry'.

Is there any evidence that longer options are more frequently used in American English, and, if so, why should this be?

Virgin mile-high poetry


Today, I’m going to the USA for a week and have deliberately chosen to fly with Virgin, rather than the other airlines that fly to Los Angeles.

It’s nearly 25 years since I first went across the Atlantic on a Virgin flight – at a time when the upstart airline only had one leased Boeing 747-200 that spent all its time going backwards and forwards between Gatwick and Newark.

The prohibitive cost of advertising throughout the whole of the USA also prompted the airline's founder to embark on a series of stunts, like crossing the Atlantic in a speed boat, that attracted huge amounts of (free) publicity on American TV news networks.

Right from the start, Richard Branson knew exactly how much it would cost him to hand the plane back to Boeing if the venture didn’t work out. He also had the benefit of a couple of top tips from Freddie Laker, whose transatlantic Skytrain business had only recently collapsed.

One was that the Boeing 747-200 would be a better bet than the DC10s used by Skytrain, because the Boeings were big enough to bring in extra revenue by carrying cargo as well as passengers.

The other was not to concentrate on the backpacker end of the market, as Skytrain had done, but to cater for business passengers too.

So the upstairs deck in the early Virgin flights to Newark were set aside for the cheekily named ‘Upper Class’, which was soon attracting enough customers for it to be extended into the front section of the main deck as well.

It was helped along by two neat marketing ploys. One was summed up in the slogan ‘fist class quality at business class prices’, and the other was that Upper Class passengers were handed a plain brown envelope during the flight, in which there was a free coach-class ticket for another flight across the Atlantic.

On one occasion, I sat next to an English stockbroker who was working in New York. As his company let him decide on which airline to use for his regular transatlantic trips, there was no contest – he always flew on Virgin because the free ticket meant that both his parents were flying with him (for nothing and not for the first time) in the back of the plane.

In those early days, Virgin made a real effort to run Upper Class like a club, with a games area and a bottomless bar where you could go and chat to the itinerant rock 'n roll groups for whom Virgin had already become the airline of choice.

As you’d expect in a club, there was also a visitors’ book, in which customers' comments heaped at least as much praise on Virgin as the scorn they poured on British Airways and other competitors.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, one of the entries is still stuck firmly in my mind, and confirms yet again how effective simple poetic techniques like rhythm, rhyme and/or assonance can be, whether you’re writing a speech, a presentation or a comment in Virgin Atlantic's visitors’ book.

It was at a time when Britain’s (then) second biggest airline, the long-since defunct British Caledonian, was running TV commercials that showed air hostesses in kilts dancing along the aisle to entertain passengers – which must have inspired one wag to compose the following ditty for the Upper Class visitors’ book:

'B-Cal girls are all very fine
But give me a virgin every time.'


(Until 8th May, Virgin permitting, I’ll be in the USA, from where I hope to be able to carry on putting posts on the blog – but don’t be surprised if there’s a slight reduction in output during the next week).