So yeah, the Brits happened. David Bowie cleaned up, blah blah blah. Oooh, yes, there was that controversial bit at the end of his speech about Scottish independence. But the fact that that was the most newsworthy aspect of the night doesn’t say very much about the rest of the three hours.
It’s certainly true that award ceremonies are addictive viewing for some of us, but I submit that they’re addictive at least partly because we want to see who gives the most embarrassing speech. It amazes me that, on what might conceivably be the biggest night of an artist’s career, they are about as prepared as I would be if I suddenly received a knighthood because my peers voted me best blogger in the universe ever.
It’s not just musos who are bad at giving speeches, though. Actors who should know better (or dare I say, should be able to ACT as if they know what they’re doing) are possibly the worst ever. Gwyneth Paltrow, Halle Berry… Ouch. And Kate Winslet’s ‘gather’ and ‘oh, who’s the other one?!’ (ie, nominee – Angelina Jolie) speech is now notorious. ‘I’m now going to try and do this off the cuff’ says it all. Off the cuff? Why didn’t she prepare, given that she had a 20% chance of winning? Oh, and she declared undying love to Leonardo DiCaprio, obviously, but then she is female and has a pulse, so... But as I say, the point is...
why on EARTH would you not prepare for something like that?
Throughout the Brit Awards last week, we had boring speech after boring speech, with people not believing it and asking how ‘London’ was feeling tonight – in response to which ‘London’ had to ‘make some noise’. ‘London’ also had to whoop whenever anybody quite famous was declared to be ‘in the house’. Yawn.
Frankly, it was toe-curling. And it set me wondering whether there might be a market for writing personalised acceptance speeches for award ceremonies. Are we copywriters missing a trick? After all, I don’t know that many best men who don’t at least have a cursory look around the internet to find out what makes a good best man’s speech. And by and large, they’re only ‘performing’ for 10-200 people; not a worldwide audience of many millions. I know I could do a darn sight better than most of what I saw at the Brits.
So if we, as professional writers who often write short and pithy prose, also wrote personalised acceptance speeches, we’d just need to know the names of the main people they needed to thank (not everybody they’ve ever met – and their pets) and perhaps what challenges the project brought. That’s it – end of.
There were some stand-out performances in the speech department, however. Ironically, David Bowie’s was one of the better ones – ironic inasmuch as he wasn’t actually there to give it. As Noel Gallagher, who presented the award for Best Male Solo Artist, put it when the massive cheer went up when Bowie won:
‘You maniacs didn't think David Bowie was actually going to be here! He doesn't do this shit!’
Ouch – one in the eye for the organisers, perhaps?
If one were feeling cool, one would say props to David Bowie for not wanting to be part of such an embarrassing display of deity making. We’re assuming he wasn’t just busy, obviously. And one would also say thank goodness that the speech he wrote, read out by Kate Moss, was about as surreal as a lot of his early lyrics. No reading out of lists of meaningless names of managers and so on for Mr Bowie; and no ‘I’m in shock right now’ gushing which some of the younger acts seem to think passes as a speech. Instead, we got:
'In Japanese myth, the rabbits on my old costume that Kate's wearing live on the moon. Kate comes from Venus and I from Mars.' [KATE: ‘So that’s nice.’]
'I am completely delighted to have a Brit for being the Best Male. But I am, aren't I, Kate?' [Kate mouths ‘yes’.]
‘I think it's a great way to end the day. Thank you very, very much and Scotland, stay with us.'
But even then, it’s not so much ‘I have a dream’ as ‘this is a bit of a nightmare.’
Funnily enough, One Direction did a reasonable job simply from the comedy point of view. Harry Styles didn’t even get to the stage on time to receive the Global Success Award because he need the loo and ‘the toilets [were] ages away.’ When he did eventually bounce curly-haired onto the stage, he had to lean in with a stage whisper, asking, ‘What did we win?’ (cos yeah, they win loads of these things, see.)
Probably the best speech of the night, however, came from the Arctic Monkeys.
Rock stars through and through, lead singer Alex Turner looked (perhaps artificially?) bored all the way through the ceremony and accepted their two awards with a glum look that seemed to say, ‘Oh, for God’s sake – now where’s THIS one going to go?’ What he actually said when they won Album of the Year was this:
‘Thank you. Thank you, one two. One, two. There we go. Ah. That rock 'n' roll, eh? That rock 'n' roll, it just won't go away. It'll... It might hibernate from time to time, sink back into the swamp. I think the cyclical nature of the universe in which it exists demands it adheres to some of its rules. But it's always waiting there just around the corner, ready to make its way back through the sludge and smash through the glass ceiling, looking better than ever. Yeah, that rock 'n' roll, it seems like it's fading away sometimes but it will never die. And there's nothing you can do about it. Thank you very f... much for this. I truly appreciate it. Don't take that the wrong way. And, yeah, invoice me for the microphone if you need to. (He drops the microphone deliberately from a height.)
Weird? Yes. Good? Erm, not sure. Maybe, yes. Different and interesting, and rock ‘n’ roll? Definitely.
Ashley is a copywriter, editor, blogger and celebrity award ceremony speech writer
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