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Tuesday 31 January 2012

LOOK! Things I think are dire : The way politicians are media trained


What is it with politicians on the telly and radio? It’s media training gone mad I tell you. It all started with Tony B and his never ending helicopter style gesticulating. If that wasn’t annoying enough the tourettes-style hand movements are now joined by the never ending command to ‘Look'. They start every sentence by telling the interviewer and therefore me to ‘Look’! But Mr/Mrs Politician, oh where am I looking? Who am I looking at? You are on the radio, I cannot see you. I am driving; if I look I might crash.

Look is frankly a rather rude way to get someone’s attention at the best of times (unless you are walking around the supermarket with a 2 year old in tow and trying to distract him from grabbing at the seductively placed 2 year old eye level kinder eggs by diverting his attention to the man in the dinner jacket spinning round the supermarket singing ‘sorry to bother yoooooou’.)

It’s really as annoying as anyone who has an annoying professional repetitive verbal habit (um, sort of, you know what I mean, basically and so on) but a little bit more so because a) they are politicians and high up there on the annoying scale anyway and b) on the radio and telly all the bloody time IN MY FACE TELLING ME TO LOOK!

Can I be the only person who is perturbed by it? I say no, so I ask Jo, she agrees big time “So very patronising” she asserts. I Google it and lo there’s a whole community of anti-lookers. Ha, I knew I wasn’t alone.

So please media trainers of Great Britain, get out your thesauruses and help the poor parroty politicians of Great Britain get over their look addictions.
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4 comments:

  1. Dave Wilson31 January 2012 at 03:21

    Look, I know how you feel but calm down dear.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown31 January 2012 at 03:40

    Look, this is just getting silly - by the way is the plural of thesaurus thesauri? If not, why not?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jodie Davis31 January 2012 at 04:22

    Maybe this is a new behavioural economic technique? Although it seems to be grounded in classical economic theory in which people act rationally. You tell them to look and they will look. However, it's been proved in a range of inter-disciplinary experiments that people often don't behave as expected.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Charlotte31 January 2012 at 04:27

    ooh, good point Mrs D, however tis hard to look when am driving at 80 down the M25. I wonder if they do it to buy themselves time, rather than going 'um'

    ReplyDelete

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