Hair-raising

Description

I have a lot of sympathy for the individuals, often volunteers, who take on the task of booking speakers for the organisations that I do talks for because if they haven’t seen the speaker themselves or been given a recommendation by someone they trust,  they have no idea if the speakers they are booking are excellent, or the other thing, until they actually stand up and perform. I’ve heard of some very pleasant surprises bookers have had when taking a punt on an unknown speaker but also some hair-raising anecdotes of the other sort. Worst of all, perhaps, according to the organiser of one luncheon club, was the speaker who came highly recommended but turned out not to have an “off switch”. They were still speaking an hour and fifty minutes after they started, ignoring all the increasingly desperate “wind up” and “throat-cutting” hand signals from the organiser. In the end, she said she had to snatch the microphone out of his hand and bring the proceedings to an abrupt halt, much other apparent disgust of the speaker who might still have been in full flow now, had he not been so rudely interrupted.

My own worst experience was when doing a talk at a celebration dinner for a large food company in a cavernous hall with about 300 guests. There was a lavish meal followed by a celebrity chef doing a demonstration and I was due to begin my talk at 9.00. However the whole evening was so chaotic and the celebrity chef over-ran by such a massive amount – a chef with a huge ego, who would have imagined that? – that when he finally packed up and disappeared out of the door, it was ten past eleven. The audience were already shuffling their feet and looking at their watches, worrying about making their last trains, so I said to the organiser, “We seem to have over-run by quite a bit, so I won’t take it personally if you want to wrap the evening up now and not bother with my talk.” The unspoken subtext was of course: “… providing I still get paid.”

“Oh no,” he said, “I want you to speak.”

He was adamant and not wanting to forego my fee, I had no option but to agree. “Okay, fine,” I said. “Where’s the microphone?”

“Ah, I’m afraid the celebrity chef has taken it home with him.”

He still wanted me to speak, so I had to stand up and shout at 300 people, many of whom were already getting to their feet and heading for the exits. The only good thing to come out of the night was that I did eventually get paid…

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