It’s a maxim of media training that when the jackals are threatening to bite your leg off, it’s a good idea to bring some bones with you.

By lobbing them the occasional bone (from the butcher’s, not your own body… ) […]

Excellent communication is sadly rare in the corporate world, and I’ve come to realise that what’s lacking is the ‘ingredients of news’, the elements that journalists look for when they’re doing an interview or researching a story.

Because these elements are not just about news – they are actually present in […]

As more and more people make their own videos, this is a question that causes increasing confusion.

The choices are, speaking directly into the camera lens, and speaking slightly off camera, as if to an unseen interviewer, standing slightly to one side of the camera, who […]

A peculiar feature of the UK General Election was that leading politicians appeared to be competing in the use of the speech mannerism known as the ‘glottal stop’. This is a feature of several British accents where a letter T in the middle or end of a word is replaced […]

As a film-maker, whether you’re making a broadcast TV show or a business video, at some point you are probably going to have to have one or more people on the screen talking.

The most common approach, alas, is to […]

Bankers, eh? Don’t you just love ‘em? Well, no, of course you don’t. In the current climate it would be perverse if you did. In yet another public opinion survey published in the London Evening Standard on 12 February 2015, […]

Me and Winnie go back a long way. Sadly, at our first encounter he was already dead. It was a cold, damp day in January 1965 and the great man’s coffin was being processed with massive ceremony on a gun […]

Last week I was chatting to a group of friends in my local pub. One of them, Jim, hadn’t been there for a while, so I asked him what he’d been up to.

‘Not a lot,’ he said. There […]

Here’s the Crisis Communication Song, which I was asked to write and perform in BBC Radio this week, with a short introduction.

Enjoy!

And a radio interview about pretty much my entire life….?

That’s what happened to me this week when Steve Yabsley of BBC Radio Bristol interviewed me on his show.

As someone who advises others on how to present themselves on radio and TV, when I’m on the receiving end I have to […]