Pass the mic

By Stuart Husband
“ARENA”, 06 October, 2000

Early this year, Rolf Harris was giving a speech to a group of Aussie expats at London’Savoy hotel. They’d just enjoyed a slap-up lunch washed down with plenty of Barossa Chardonnay and were lapping up Rolfs uncharacteristically racy Antipodean-flavoured shtick about loose women called Sheryl, one-arm tans and the like. Then, without warning, Rolf launched into a gag about a rape victim and Melbourne Cricket Club. The joke’s bad-taste bawdiness quickly backfired and the room fell silent long before Rolf delivered the punchline – "He wasn’t in for very long." One eyewitness still hasn’t recovered from the experience:
"God, it was awful," she says. "There was some nervous laughter, but everybody was mortified. I always saw him as some sort of cuddly father-figure before that. Now I think he’s a bit dirty."

But it’s not just benign old Rolf letting his Mr Hyde side slip out through the fug of cigar smoke, the clubby ambience and repeated raiding of the complimentary liqueur stocks. After-dinner speaking, once regarded not so much as the poor relation of the entertainment industry, but, rather, the drooling idiot who was only allowed out under cover of darkness, has gone legit and spawned a whole industry of bookers and brokers, as well oiled as the clients it’s catering for. And the "turns" they provide for those clients – some household names, some complete unknowns, many whatever-happened-tos, even a few willing to compromise their "cutting-edge" reputations – can regard the speaking circuit as a literal meal ticket (three courses, optional cheeseboard).

If you want to add some comic zest,
celebrity cachet or has-been barracking to your annual works bun fight, the first thing you should do is approach a man like Adam Sternberg. Adam, a genial former advertising man with a thick mop of dark hair, is a director of Sternberg-Glarke, an agency which, as its peppy brochure puts it, "has been booking acts for the corporate market for the last ten years".

"We’re brokers," he says. "We don’t manage acts or individuals. We get requests from companies and try and put them together with acts we think would best suit their specific event."

The type of speaker being sought falls into three main categories, according to Dominic Morley, a former church deacon who runs another agency, Speakers UK, in Aberdeen. "You’ve got what we call business or motivational speakers, who are hired for conferences and seminars to inspire and evangelise; they could be politicians, business leaders, even explorers or ex-forces people."
He reels off some examples: Sir Michael Grade, Baroness Thatcher, Sir Ranulph Fiennes and, at the more incongruous end of the scale, Andrew Neil and Jane Asher.

Secondly, there arc the circuit speakers – those who are well accustomed to addressing large gatherings and extemporising freely without, as Morley puts it, "frightening the horses". This category also encompasses those hired as link-persons for awards ceremonies and the like and includes everyone from Cynthia Payne, Ned Sherrin and Ian Hislop to Jayne Middlemiss, Johnny Vaughan and Chris Evans. Finally, there are the pure showbiz speakers, those who turn up, do their act, pocket the cheque and go home. Naturally, there are comics here, both old-school (Monkhouse, Gorbett, Tarby) and newish (Rory Bremner, Graham Norton) plus, frankly, special-school types (Bernie Glifton, who – yes! – rides in on his giant ostrich, Bob Carolgees with Spit The Dog, Timmy Mallett etc) and a small army of ex-kids’-TV presenters who incite strange stirrings in men and women of a certain age – Maggie Philbin, John Graven, Keith Chegwin...

So what motivates these people to haul themselves round the country and pitch up, night after night, in front of a sea of strange faces from the likes of, say, the Sheet Metal Fabrication Guild? In a word, greed. The lists of speakers sent out by the agencies are an eloquent expression of the old saw that everyone has a price and some of those prices are, to say the least, diverting. Weatherman lan McCasldll and steeplejack Fred Dibnah seem good value at £1,000 apiece, if you want homespun anecdotes about frontal systems and very tall chimneys; Gyles Brahdreth and his amazing jumpers, ex-copper John Stalker and Daily Mail nanny-to-the-nation Lynda Lee Potter all come in at a reasonable £2,000.

True, £6,000 seems a small price to pay for the chance to heckle Michael Portillo or Edwina Currie.

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