Emsworth WI

I was back in Emsworth last Friday morning for a return visit to their Women's Institute who I had last spoken to a year before. I arrived in good time and began my talk about Patrick Campbell for the 55 ladies present.

About halfway through, their President got a signal from a member in the second row that the room was too cold (they had heaters on but a skylight was open) so she stood up a few feet off to the side of me and started pulling the cords to try and close it. I was halfway through a story at the time and immediately most heads had turned to watch her, with the result that I was now seemingly talking to myself!

To have just stopped dead would have looked tetchy so I abbreviated that part of my presentation as best I could and waited for the matter to be sorted out. I got a laugh from the audience by saying that I expected the President to go shooting up into the ceiling on the end of the cord (it reminded me of the classic Gerard Hoffnung 'Barrel of Bricks' routine), the window was eventually closed, she apologised and I very swiftly re-capped and continued.

I have noticed that audiences who know each other well seem to be the most easily distracted if one of them arrives late, leaves the room, closes a window, etc - however well the speaker's presentation is being received. Other groups tend to be more focussed and better able to ignore such goings-on.

Interruptions are an occupational hazard for any speaker. When I was teaching my more advanced 'Stage 2' presentation skills evening  classes, there would be a fun lesson where I would deliberately interrupt my more experienced students' presentations by dropping things noisily on the floor, banging doors shut, even sitting on a whoopee cushion, but this wasn't so much an exercise about coping with the unexpected, it was more to do with them not losing their thread.

A speaker has to make a very quick decision about how to deal with each interruption as it occurs. If you try to shout over the sound of the loud siren of the police car driving past the venue, you may give the impression that you are so at the mercy of your script that it will be fatal for you to stop! Some interruptions will dictate that you have to stop immediately anyway, for example, if an audience member is taken ill (this has happened during a few of my talks but I was reassured afterwards that it was nothing to do with my choice of material!) Sometimes the interruptions will continue throughout your presentation (I once gave talk to a Wine Circle who met in one room of a Community Centre while a local amateur dramatic society rehearsed the village pantomime in a neighbouring hall with very thin walls. Can you imagine that? Oh yes you can!) And there are occasions when you can just carry on and ignore what appears to be a minor interruption because stopping would draw it to the attention of people who wouldn't otherwise have noticed it.

The comfort of an audience is very important and I certainly would not have wanted the nice ladies of Emsworth to be cold - that would have been another, prolonged interruption in its own right - but I must admit that I was a little surprised by the level of distraction caused by this business; with hindsight, I think I would have preferred it if their President had stopped me, perhaps during a natural break in my material, in order to deal with the window.

Public Speaking Tip #114: If an interruption occurs during your presentation, you have to make a fast decision about whether to ignore it (such as in the case of someone's mobile going off) or stop altogether (for example, a medical emergency or noise which is too loud for you to compete with). An interruption is beyond a speaker's control; all you can do is control your response to it.

As with my last two visits to Emsworth, I went to Bookends and this time I picked up a slim volume of quotations, many of which were unfamiliar to me, and a biography of Jack Benny co-written by his widow. Benny was, of course, best-known as a stage, radio and TV comedian (not to mention violinist!) but he also gave highly-acclaimed speeches (which, according to this book, he wrote himself). I am really looking forward to reading the life story of a comedian and speaker who knew, perhaps more than any, the power of the pause - and had the confidence to employ it.