We can all agree that it takes a great talker to make lime plaster sound exciting. But the wrong person, with the wrong tone of voice and a flat delivery, can make even advances in satellite technology sound as boring as concrete.
I've been looking out for more stories about the UK's bid to become a serious player in satellite launches ever since watching a mesmerizing interview with Dr Anna Hogg of Space Hub Yorkshire on Channel 4 News.
Dr Hogg was on the programme to reflect on what was being framed as a failed attempt to launch the first UK satellite-carrying rocket safely into orbit. By the end of the five minute interview, she had managed to re-frame the narrative from 'failure to launch into orbit' to 'successful the first UK launch into space'. Launching rockets, it turns out, is really hard.
She also made me, and I bet many other viewers, excited about the wonderful possibilities opening up for the UK in the next space frontier of data gathering by satellite. Her passion for the subject and her enthusiastic but layman-friendly delivery made her a compelling watch.
So, when this morning BBC Radio 4's Today introduced an interview with Euan Clark, Projects Team Lead at Skyrora, my ears pricked up. (You can listen to the interview yourself for the next 30 days here, at the 1.21 mark.)
In the intro we were told that five out of the seven prospective UK space ports are sited in Scotland and that Skyrora plans to start launching satellites-carrying rockets from Shetland in the spring. So far, so exciting but I'm afraid it was all downhill from there.
Bear in mind this was a good news story. Mr Clark wasn't there to defend anything. All he had to do was sell his company's cutting-edge work. Yet, speaking in a gentle, bored monotone reminiscent of a bus tour guide, he managed to remind us of ever looming disaster in his very first answer, stating that Shetland was chosen because "if anything goes wrong, we're over the North Sea".
He carried on describing the planned test launch, its phases, components and purpose in the flattest, most workmanlike way possible, in a succession of short sentences that gave the viewers no context and no sense of what's at stake and why they should care.
This left the presenter to do the hard work of injecting a sense of wonder in a story that should have been naturally interesting because of the novelty of the technology, the relevance to the UK economy and also, you know, space.
"Twenty-two meters long! And, er, will it have more than one satellite on at the time?" she injected. "Goodness, a shoe-box sized satellite! And what can those do?", she gushed, becoming ever so slightly shrill in the effort.
I was listening to this on my BBC Sounds app while going about my morning business, moving around the kitchen, putting stuff in the washing machine, as you do, and had to stop several times and listen back because nothing he said stuck with me. I could hear the presenter's questions, but a wave of static seemed to come over the answers.
So, I listened again, several times, as I was writing this, which led me to a couple of reflections and one main lesson.
1) While I have no doubt Mr Clark is extremely competent to talk about Skyrora's project, and I understood all his answers, he might not have been the best person for the job of making us care about it or comprehend the ways in which this could be game-changing.
2) I'm sure he could learn to do this and become quite good at it, even though he's probably not a natural. It would not have taken much to help him prepare for this interview, given how confident he is with the technical side of the material. But it simply didn't occur to anyone that he might need media training, presumably because of how confident he is with the technical side of the material.
The lesson here is that media training is not just something to be deployed to make nervous speakers less reluctant to go on air. It is a tool for improving anyone's ability to communicate effectively with a wider audience and have an impact with their perception of the story, no matter how confident they might already feel.
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