For Heaven’s Sake…..

I’ve spent some time, recently, listening to a speaker who’d been described to me as “brilliant” and “inspirational”. I went, therefore, with a certain expectation and got exactly what I expected. J John’s certainly charismatic and entertaining… but I nearly didn’t go because of the video material he had on his website.

Watching the videos, obviously intended to show me how good the speaker was, my hackles were raised (so to speak), by his ‘personal’ stories. The problem was that they weren’t. Personal that is, not that they weren’t stories. Anything that starts “A couple of months ago, I ….” should be about something that happened a couple of months ago to the speaker – not a re-telling of material the comedian Dave Allen was using on the BBC over a decade ago! It’s a shame, because the idea was good and the story was certainly relevant but it jarred on me…

Even on the night, there were a dozen times when it was possible to tell the story a few seconds ahead of the speaker, because we’d heard it before somewhere else.

Now I freely admit that I’m over-critical in terms of things like that so it may be that I was the only person in the audience of a couple of thousand who was actually bugged by this pretense, (though I wasn’t the only person who noticed it) but why, for the sake of a simple gag, pretend? It may have felt like a little white lie from the speaker’s point of view but who cares about the speaker’s point of view – it’s all about the audience’s perspective.

Given that the speaker was a Christian evangelist, and presumably he was keen on getting me along, it seems a silly mistake to make. If it’s yours, use it – if it’s someone else’s, accredit it!