Do you say “says” as in “fez” or “says” as in “ways”? What about “ate” as in “weight” or “ate” as in “bet”? Is it “CONtroversy” or “ConTROVersy”? During the seventies, Brian Widlake, a distinguished presenter of the BBC’s The World at One, shook Broadcasting House to its foundations when he started pronouncing “disPUTE” as […]
Can you ask for a list of questions before a media interview?
A lot of participants who take part in our media training courses ask this question: “When we do a real-life interview, can we expect questions in advance?” Having conducted hundreds of interviews during my career, I’ve never once conveyed to an interviewee, ahead of our encounter in the studio, in their office or out in […]
Yes Minister, that is the way to do a media interview: how even politicians can get it right
When the new ministerial appointments were made this week, following the Brexit exits of Davis and Johnson, something very significant struck me about Jeremy Hunt being promoted to Foreign Secretary, Matt Hancock taking his place as Health Secretary and Dominic Raab becoming the new Brexit Secretary. If you watch or listen to their media interviews, […]
The four categories of participants on a media training course
A row of unfamiliar faces along the other side of the conference table. Three, four, maybe five. The start of another media training session. Soon those faces will begin to swim into focus and their owners’ characters will start to emerge as the course gets under way. Yet already, even before the course has started, […]
Why a down-the-line interview took the sparkle out of Mr Markle
Unless you’re in a dramatic location – the scene of a fire, earthquake or riot etc – a down-the-line TV interview, where you, the interviewee, looks directly into the camera and hears questions through an earpiece, is rarely as attractive as being in the studio, where the interviewer can see the “whites of your eyes” […]
How to cure the shocking ‘disease’ at the heart of the NHS
Very rarely a piece of communication stops me in my tracks. Today it was this tweet from NHS England, showing a sort of flow chart diagram to illustrate “Sustainable Improvement Team Impact Framework”. We have developed an Impact Framework to capture the full value of #QI and transformational change programmes, moving beyond #measurementforimprovement to discover […]
Avoiding tricky questions
When being interviewed, many spokespeople choose to ignore the question being put to them by the TV or radio news presenter and answer a different question instead – one they would prefer to answer. That’s a very bad technique. Firstly, it says to the viewer or listener that the interviewee is deliberately trying to ignore […]
Why the Facebook furore contains an unexpected language lesson for all communicators
Any follower of this week’s news would probably have heard the following words – mining, harvesting and scraping. They seem to hark back to an age of agricultural graft and industrial toil. Not so. They’ve all featured in the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica story, a tale of data and democracy. In other words, computers, not coal or […]
The Long Goodbye: The death of the long-form interview
In years long ago, when television was young and black and white, a weekly interview programme called Face to Face was a must-see event. Visually, the set-up could not have been simpler. A comfortable armchair, a small table for one’s pipe, cigar or cigarette, and facing you a man called John Freeman, who had been […]
When it comes to the crunch, you can’t beat a crisp soundbite
If you’d stopped 100 people anywhere beyond Whitehall yesterday and asked them, “Who is Sir Martin Donnelly?” I bet you’d have seen 100 blank faces. If you’d asked the same people if they’d heard anything in the news about crisp packets and Brexit, I’m sure many would have referred to a story that dominated the […]
