Speeches that Shook the World

This programme contains some strong language.

From the most basic elements - a voice, an audience, words -

alchemy can take place.

Cry - God for Harry! England and St George!

A speech can rally an army, fight for justice...

I hate wars, but I like fighting.

..honour a loved one, define a cause...

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

It is like watching a nation

busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

..appeal to a nation...

You righted the doubters, and you scattered the gloomsters.

Spit it out! Come on!

You are ferocious in battle.

Remember to be magnanimous in victory.

..and inspire a country.

We shall never surrender.

Speech-making is the art of persuasion.

Well-honed rhetoric appeals not just to the mind,

but to the heart and to something deeper down as well in the guts.

I want to dissect what it takes to make a great speech,

to understand its anatomy, what gives it its life force and vigour,

or in some cases, what kills it dead.

And to wonder whether delivery and argument and rhythm and cadence

can all combine together

to make what we might think of as the perfect speech.

I want to start by stripping away the flesh of speech-making

and examining the bare bones, the words.

One of Britain's best known orators was Winston Churchill,

whose emotive wartime speeches

proved to be masterpieces of inspiration.

..And with the British Empire around us,

we shall fight on, unconquerable,

until the curse of Hitler is lifted

from the brows of men.

..Turning the tide of the world war

by their prowess and by their devotion.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed

by so many

to so few.

Churchill was fascinated by the art of rhetoric,

and honed his skills throughout his career,

but it wasn't until the horror of World War II

that his poetic battle cries found their place -

strengthening the nation's resolve.

We shall fight with growing confidence

and growing strength in the air,

we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,

we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,

we shall fight in the hills - we shall never surrender.

Churchill used to talk about his speeches

and the way he wrote them as psalms,

and you can hear as he goes through it, the line endings.

I even think you can pick out rhymes and half rhymes,

so it goes, "beach," "street,"

"believe," "see," "fleet,"

and the pauses get longer and longer and longer.

The drama is cranked up.

As a poet, I have to admire his use of compressed language,

his deployment of metaphor, powerful imagery,

repetition and rhythm.

Neither the sudden shock of battle

nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion

will wear us down.

Give us the tools and we will finish the job!

Churchill's speeches might sound natural and from the heart.

The reason that they're so compelling

is that he's using every trick in the book.

There are lots of different rhetorical techniques,

some of them with fancy-sounding Greek names,

but the most important principal is you structure your argument clearly.

With that in mind, I've just come for a little refresher course.

I just wanted to take a couple of turns with you

on the ideas carousel, yeah?

Think of ways we can turn your team into a little cluster of excellence.

In a case of real life imitating art, actor Vincent Franklin,

who plays the blue-sky-thinking guru Stewart Pearson

in the political satire The Thick of It,

is also a professional speech coach.

Let's imagineer a narrative.

So most of my time is spent being Stewart Pearson,

and holding that up in front of them

and going, "It makes you look a bit of a twat!"

So, let's say that I came to you,

because I wanted you to help me write a speech, how would that work?

I would ask these questions - what do you want people to know,

what do you want them to feel, and what do you want them do,

because it's not a presentation, it's a speech,

and that's a really big difference.

I can present the facts,

but a speech has to be something that motivates you to do something.

Do you do the nuts and bolts stuff, you know,

right down to choosing the words?

I talk a lot about the ladder abstraction.

Cos at the top of that ladder of abstraction is the big idea,

so it...you know, in Blair's case...

Education, education, and education.

It's really important you have a big thing you believe in and a big idea,

but it's very abstract, so I would then help them come down that ladder.

What, into, sort of, finer detail?

Into detail, into real things,

so if at the top there's education,

and in the middle is, therefore, investing in schools,

at the bottom is making sure that class sizes are only 30 people in it.

-Really good speeches move up and down that.

-Mm.

That idea applies to poetry as well, where you're often trying to get

the universal and the particular to work at the same time.

Poetry paints pictures in my head, and good speeches do that too,

and if I don't go away remembering that image or that idea,

that opened up a bigger idea,

it doesn't resonate with me, doesn't stick.

You know, Churchill says, "We will fight them on the beaches,"

he doesn't say there will be skirmishes in coastal regions -

do you know what I mean? I see a beach, and I see fighting.

Vincent has lots of new jargon for speech-writing,

but the principals of rhetoric

were first identified by the philosopher Aristotle, in ancient Greece.

Knowledge is porridge.

Oh. Jesus, Stewart, that doesn't even fucking rhyme!

Probably worth mentioning Aristotle and the Greeks,

cos they would talk about first of all logos, ethos and pathos,

and so logos is making sure it's logical,

and it's really important because you need to make sure your speech has a structure to it,

and an argument that is logic so that A follows B follows C.

I really like the phrase, "and because of that."

I use that a lot with people, which is, "I want to make the world better, and because of that I'm doing this."

Rather than saying, "I'm doing this, because I want to make the world better," which is backwards.

One nation. We're going to make it happen.

And today, I'm going to tell you how.

Ethos is about the belief in the person, is about trust,

do I really believe this person,

are they talking and presenting themselves

in a way that means I kind of buy into them.

I ask you to accept one thing.

Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.

Pathos is about the emotion, and that's really important.

I'm talking about how I feel about these things,

and why they matter to me,

as opposed to just being logical and being impressive,

it's about dealing with those emotions.

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear

is fear itself.

There, that's what Aristotle would give us,

and if you could do all of those, you're on a winner.

Logic, trust and emotion

were the basis of one of the most impressive

modern motivational speeches,

ranging from lofty ideas to searing pragmatism.

HUW EDWARDS: Baghdad tonight, under heavy bombardment,

on the day the war started.

Tonight, British servicemen and women

are engaged from air, land and sea.

Their mission - to remove Saddam Hussein from power

and disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.

We are going in to Iraq to liberate and not to conquer.

We will not fly our flags in their country.

There are some who are alive at this moment

who will not be alive shortly.

Those of them who do not wish to go on that journey,

we will not send them.

As for the others, I expect you to rock their world.

Wipe them out if that's what they choose.

If you are ferocious in battle,

remember to be magnanimous in victory.

This is the dramatised version

of Colonel Tim Collins' rousing speech

made to his troops, the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment,

on the eve of war, March 2003.

It was almost as if nature had conspired for this moment

because it was an overcast, very grey day.

As I looked north towards Iraq,

already you could see the black plumes of smoke

and the bright orange flames where they'd started blowing up oil wells,

so you had this almost Hollywood-esque setting

for the epic that was about to happen.

Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden...

..of the Great Flood. It is the birthplace of Abraham.

You tread...

You tread lightly there.

There's a line about being "ferocious in battle"

but "magnanimous in victory,"

and there seems to be a whole velvet glove, iron fist thing

going on throughout the whole speech.

Were you conscious of that at all?

I wanted them to understand that this is only stuff you might have

seen in the movies, but it's not like the movies, this is real.

"You'll see things that no man could pay to see.

"You'll have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous

"and upright people than the Iraqis.

"You'll be embarrassed by their hospitality,

"even though they have nothing.

"Don't treat them as refugees in their own country."

If there are casualties of war, then remember that when they got up

this morning and got dressed, they did not plan to die this day.

So allow them dignity in death.

Bury them with due reverence, and properly mark their graves.

How important is morale that comes from a speech like that?

I suddenly realised that for many of them

it was probably going to be the end of their young lives.

I wanted them to understand what was happening

and why it was happening so they could cope with that context.

Some of them hadn't even seen their granny dead.

I was speaking to them both as my men, I was speaking to them as my children.

I wanted them to understand what they could do

and I wanted to make clear what I wouldn't accept.

"It's a big step to take another human life,

"and it's not to be done lightly.

"I know of men who have taken life needlessly in conflicts,

"and I can assure you, they live with the mark of Cain upon them."

At times, it seems to have echoes of the church sermon.

Have you got sermons ringing in your ears?

Being brought up in Presbyterian Ireland,

that's how vicars talk to you,

and that's how you expect that to come across.

Let's bring everybody home safely...

..and leave Iraq a better place for us having been there.

Our business now is north.

Good luck.

Are yours the words that are needed to carry them over that threshold

and into battle?

You urge them to choose to go forward by creating

the realisation that the shame of stepping back is far worse

than what could ever happen to you by going forward.

So rather than a bullet in the back, it's a word in the ear.

And a careful reminder you are a volunteer and an Irishman,

and there's only one way to go, and that's that way.

Tim Collins' speech used Aristotle's key points of oratory -

logos, explaining to his men what would happen to them in battle,

ethos, appealing to them as comrades and colleagues

and friends, trying to get them on side and gain their trust,

and then the thing that interests me most as a poet,

pathos, symbols, the use of imagery,

trying to elicit an emotional response,

a call to bravery, and patriotism and decency.

But of course getting the right words and structuring a speech

isn't that easy.

What seems like a good idea on paper

can strike a bum note when said out loud.

And a speech can fall completely flat.

Your vote will be a vote for action plus words.

"Unaccustomed as I am" might be a tired old phrase,

but for most people, it happens to be true.

For a lot of men, the only speech they'll give in their life

is a best man's speech.

It's a huge honour, but a great responsibility,

and for a lot of people, a terrifying prospect.

Um...where was I?

LAUGHTER

Fornication...

For an occasion...such as this...

A little bit of Dutch courage can help, but one too many

and the words start to dry up and suddenly, you're dying on your feet.

You can't deny it's been an emotional day today.

Even the cake is in "tiers."

LAUGHTER

Though, at least whatever you do say, will probably be forgotten

in a haze of champagne bubbles,

unlike those under the savage glare of media scrutiny,

unable to escape ridicule.

The quiet man is here to stay and he's turning up the volume.

Our enemies are innovated and resourceful. And so are we.

They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country

and our people, and neither do we.

Politicians live or die by what comes out of their mouths,

and they need their oratorical skills just to survive.

The aim is to campaign in poetry, and govern in prose.

But in reality, it's just one buzzword after another.

I promise I'm not making this up.

Speaking like human beings! We must never lose that.

Aspiration, opportunity.

These are words.

Words that are so basic, and yet so powerful,

so modest, and yet so hard to believe.

These are not dirty, elitist words.

Trust me.

Nothing funny about that.

Generation Y is starting to become, generation why do we bother?

Victorian politicians,

like Gladstone and Disraeli, were great orators.

They learnt the art of public speaking from Shakespeare and the Bible

and rigorously practiced classical skills of rhetoric.

Today's politicians use many of the same tricks.

There's praeteritio - saying you won't talk about something,

but in not doing so, shouting it from the rooftops...

We gather to affirm the greatness of our nation.

Not because of the height of our skyscrapers

or the power of our military or the size of our economy.

Using the rule of three...

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!

Or anaphora - where you repeat phrases for effect...

Let both sides explore what problems unite us.

Let both sides seek to invoke

the wonders of science instead of its terrors.

Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth

the command of Isaiah -

to undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free.

Or, you can employ the services of a professional,

for whom rhetoric is their bread and butter.

Maybe I'm naive, but I still feel a little bit cheated

when I think that some of the big beasts of politics

who speak so passionately about ideas and policy

actually have all their words provided for them by a pro!

If I could press a button

and genuinely solve the unemployment problem,

do you think that I would not press that button this instant?

Phil, what would you say are the key ingredients of a speech?

Well, think you've got to have a strong argument.

You'll never have a good speech that isn't something you can summarise

in one sentence.

Everybody thinks that's a terrible thing,

the soundbite. I think it's a good discipline.

The demands of modern media,

when you're not published verbatim in the Times the following morning,

require you to think hard about what it is you're trying to say.

To those waiting with baited breath for that favourite media catchphrase

the U-turn,

I have only one thing to say.

You turn if you want to.

LAUGHTER

The lady's not for turning.

You were a speech writer for Tony Blair for a couple of years,

and you've written a lot of political speeches.

What's the process there?

We would do most of the work on the morning of the speech,

and to say it was informal was an understatement.

He'd be sitting there at his table, usually in his boxer shorts,

writing longhand with a fountain pen on blank pieces of paper.

He would write the beginning of the speech, the opening, and the end.

I'd write the body in the middle that sort of got him from A to B,

the bit that supported his political argument.

I'd find he was cutting and pasting the speech together,

I mean actual cutting and pasting, with scissors and glue!

He would cut things out of what I'd written, and draw arrows on them

and asterixes and "A," and then he'd hand me this thing,

like a sort of exhibit from Vision On,

and I'd take it downstairs and we'd try and make sense of it.

The best line I ever wrote in the sense of the one that made

the most headlines was his very last conference speech.

Blair had already announced that he was leaving and we knew

it would be the last time he spoke to the Labour party conference.

The day before he spoke,

Cherie Blair had completely overshadowed Gordon Brown's speech

by saying something a little bit disobliging about the Chancellor.

She denied she'd said it, but everybody thought she had.

We knew coming in to the speech, we had to find some way

of referring to this without it becoming the story.

Something I don't say often enough,

thank you to my family.

Um...

It suddenly occurred to me that this was a northern music hall gag

because we had all the components. We had his wife, the guy next door.

I thought there's got to be something Les Dawson/Arthur Askey about this.

To Cherie. I mean...

APPLAUSE

Well, at least I don't have to worry about her running off

with the bloke next door!

LAUGHTER

All the next day, all the headlines,

and all the news shows and all the papers

were about this joke - "Blair shows how brilliant he is

"with a fantastic joke that diffuses political problems."

Do you ever get jealous, you know, somebody gives a speech,

it goes down very well, they go home in their golden chariot,

and you're going home on the bus thinking,

"Actually, they were my words"?

You have to have the humility to realise that you're not

the prime minister, and you're a scriptwriter.

And somebody else is the actor,

is going to take whatever glory is on offer,

but they're also going to take

most of the criticism if it goes wrong.

I've spent a long time trying to work very hard

on the National Health Service...

SLOW CLAPPING

Thank you very much.

..to try and make sure...

You make the process sound like the writing of a play or a drama.

Is that what it feels like?

Always when I'm working with someone,

trying to think of a persona for them.

What do I imagine them being?

It's like a sort of parlour game for speech writers,

and the obvious thing for Tony Blair to be

in the latter part of his premiership

was to go back to being more the lawyer,

to making forensic arguments that weighted the evidence

and then concluded very firmly and decisively

that somebody was either guilty or innocent.

Iraq is a potentially wealthy country,

but in 1979, the year before Saddam came to power, was richer than

Portugal, Malaysia.

Today, it is impoverished. 60% of its population depended on food aid,

thousands of children die needlessly

every year from lack of food and medicine.

Four million people out of a population of just over 20 million

living in exile.

Do you think politicians stand or fall by the speeches that they give?

I think it's still the case, strangely enough,

that the political speech can make and break a political career.

The obvious example at the moment is Barack Obama,

who I think beat Hillary Clinton because he spoke so beautifully.

I get it.

I realise that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office.

I don't fit the typical pedigree,

and I haven't spent my career in the halls of Washington.

He could read the telephone book and make it sound emotional.

It's fabulous because he sings, the way he slides down consonants

and hits certain words. He's got a great, great voice.

Tonight, we've proved once more that the true strength of our nation

comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth,

but from the enduring power of our ideals - democracy,

liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.

Obama got to the presidency on a tide of elevated rhetoric.

I think you also see the limits of rhetoric in Obama,

because actually it doesn't do you much good when you get there.

In the end, you need to have something to do, not just something to say.

The greatest speeches are when those two things come together.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace,

if you seek prosperity

for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,

if you seek liberalisation, come here to this gate.

Mr Gorbachev, open this gate.

Tear down this wall.

CHEERING

With an expectant crowd waiting to hear your speech,

and those last minutes waiting to take the platform,

it all comes down to just you.

This is the platform room at Westminster Central Hall,

a green room, effectively, and like most green rooms,

it's not very glamorous.

It's really a glorified storeroom,

but 2,300 bums on seats out there, all waiting, and ready to listen,

and the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Churchill

have all waited in this room, pacing up and down,

maybe going through their little rituals

before going out onto stage,

maybe had a little bit of an energy burst, a drink of water,

maybe gone through the speech for the final time.

You can imagine Churchill perhaps having a final puff on his cigar

or Gandhi, a little bit of meditation

or adjusting his loincloth.

Now, one of the ancient techniques, apparently,

for giving a good speech and Enoch Powell used to do this,

was not to go for a pee beforehand,

even if you were desperate,

cos a full bladder apparently brings about

that extra little bit of urgency,

so I'm going to go out there and see how it feels.

Whatever you go out there to say must come from the heart.

All technique but no emotion just sounds hollow.

To fight for what you believe in, you need passion and purpose.

A great speech cannot succeed in a vacuum.

For a speech to work, society must be ready and willing to listen.

No, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied...

Throughout history, great figures have dared to speak out

on behalf of those without a voice.

And their speeches have had the power to shape public consciousness...

I regard myself as a soldier, a soldier of peace.

..even change society, change culture, change laws.

Democracy and freedom for all!

For much of the 20th century, women struggled to make themselves heard.

I haven't come here today to say, let's hear it for the women,

I'm here to say, let the women be heard.

I am here as a soldier who has temporarily left

the field of battle in order to explain what civil war is like

when civil war is waged by women.

Emmeline Pankhurst uses the emotive words "soldier," "battle,"

"war" in her rallying speech in 1913

to embody the suffrage movement's gruelling campaign.

It also reflects her own courageous conviction

to speak out at any cost.

When you hear a speech, you hear the passion

and the emotion of the person who's speaking.

You get a sense of urgency that

perhaps you may not get through the written word alone.

Now, I want to say to you who think women cannot succeed,

we have brought the government of England to this position,

that it has to face this alternative:

either women are to be killed or women are to have the vote.

Emmeline Pankhurst was an incredibly moving, powerful speaker.

Her speeches galvanized hundreds of thousands of women.

It gave them a sense that they had a right to vote, and that

their dignity as women was something they should work for and fight for.

After a long and bitter struggle for equality,

and the death of Emily Davidson,

the suffragettes' impassioned speeches had their effect.

Women over 30 got the vote in 1918.

By 1928, this was extended to all women over the age of 21.

Words and ideas are very, very powerful.

You can kill a person, but you can't easily kill an idea.

So therefore the articulation of ideas though words

is a very powerful means of communication.

But, often at a price.

Putting yourself in the firing line takes guts,

especially if it's the only way to get heard.

..to show that the British government...

Human rights activist Peter Tatchell

believes words are the best defence against oppression,

even if standing up and speaking puts him in danger.

When I am doing a speech, the first consideration for me

is the message I want to get across.

What do I believe in?

What do I want to impart?

When confronting tyrants and torturers,

I think it is not very effective to simply denounce them.

What I always try and do is pose a question

to put them on the spot.

Hi, Nick - isn't it about time you apologised to the British people

for your party's long history of anti-Semitism, homophobia

and attacks on the Muslim community?

This is the BNP in action.

Why don't you apologise, you gutless coward?

You attack the vulnerable and you won't even face an accuser.

I think a good speech often has an element of provocation,

controversy and even confrontation,

because that is the way you challenge orthodoxy.

That's the way you get people to sit up and take notice.

Emotive words can change the course of history

and those speeches are to be applauded and celebrated.

But powerful language in the wrong mouths

can be extremely dangerous.

In 1968, a Tory MP claimed to a journalist,

"I'm going to make a speech at the weekend

"and it's going to go up, 'fizz!', like a rocket.

"But whereas all rockets fall to the earth,

"this one is going to stay up."

His speech did make an impact,

but it cost him his career -

the day after, Ted Heath sacked him from the Shadow Cabinet.

I was sitting with my mum

and we heard it on the news.

We knew when we heard it

that it was going to make life unpleasant.

We have got enough immigrants into this country

and we don't want no more!

In this country, in 15 or 20 years' time

the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.

Enoch Powell's controversial speech,

made to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham, 1968

railed against the Race Relations bill.

It almost passes belief

that at this moment,

20 to 30 additional immigrant children

are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week.

Powell prophesied that mass migration

would lead to segregation and communal violence,

but it was his incendiary language that dominated the headlines.

I've seen clips of this speech before,

and I've read excerpts from it,

but I've never actually sat down and watched it and taken it in.

If anything, it's more powerful, ie, more chilling.

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation

to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents,

who are, for the most part, the material of the future growth

of the immigrant-descended population.

It is like watching a nation

busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

The day after the speech, someone came by in a car

and shouted "Nigger, go home!"

Of course I had experienced racism before,

but never in such an overt way,

never in such a blatant way and with such a sense of permission.

That was the great evil of the speech.

It gave people permission to show

that they didn't want black people in their towns, in their cities,

in their lives, in this country at all.

This is why to enact legislation

of the kind before parliament at this moment

is to risk throwing a match onto gunpowder.

I always thought Enoch Powell, in his delivery,

would be upper-class, clipped English,

but there's a Midlands twang in there.

He's coming across, in a way, as something of a man of the people.

He's got this crumpled bit of paper in his hand.

It's almost as if he's saying, "I am the last sane voice here."

I can already hear the chorus of execration.

How dare I say such a horrible thing?

How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings

by repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so.

Britain - keep it white, as it should be.

The speech split the nation.

Thousands took to the streets in support of Enoch Powell,

even petitioning for him to be reinstated

to the Shadow Cabinet.

Now that these things have been discussed publicly

in this inflammatory way,

people who do hold these extreme views

think it's respectable to come out and say them

and I'm afraid it's also become respectable for some people

to govern their behaviour by these thoughts.

Thousands more, shocked and disgusted

by the speech's blatant racism, protested.

Get out!

The core of Powell's message was bigoted and inflammatory,

but it was the words and imagery he chose that were truly incendiary.

In his speech, he refers to a letter from a pensioner

in his constituency, Wolverhampton.

"Windows are broken.

"She finds excreta pushed through her letter box.

"When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children,

"charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies.

"They cannot speak English, but one word they know.

"'Racialist,' they chant."

For me, it was personally deeply offensive

because, of course, I identified with...

How did he describe them?

"Charming, wide-eyed, grinning piccaninnies."

Enoch Powell was not a man who ever used words loosely,

and the speech is a masterpiece in its way.

The black man will have the whip hand over the white man.

I'm shocked at how offensive it actually is.

How dare I say such a horrible thing?

The language, the vocabulary,

the word "Negro", that we would never hear or use any more.

And then at the end of the speech, there's that line.

"As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding -

"like the Roman, I seem to see

"'the River Tiber foaming with much blood.'"

These words are so evocative,

the speech itself has been renamed "Rivers of Blood."

What I find really uncomfortable, and embarrassing,

is that he rounds on a metaphor.

He uses poetry to make his main point -

or his misuses poetry.

This metaphor, rivers of blood.

And as a poet, that...

Yeah, it offends me.

The rivers of blood.

It's the funeral pyre,

it's the black man with the whip hand.

That is why the speech endures as utterly repellent -

because it was designed to be.

There are occasions, though,

when an unplanned, impromptu speech

can be just as effective.

In 2011, on this street,

a woman felt so appalled by what she saw going on around her

that she felt compelled to speak out.

Unlike Enoch Powell's carefully crafted speech,

with its meticulously chosen words,

this was two minutes of unbridled spontaneity -

a passionate, unstoppable outpouring,

straight from the spleen.

It was like something out of a Mad Max movie -

absolute mayhem.

Things on fire,

cars, bikes, all sorts.

Bins upside down.

That night, for someone reason, people lost all their senses.

I didn't understand what they were doing,

and they sure as hell didn't know what they were doing.

Did you know you were going to start shouting?

Were these things that had been brewing up for a long time

and then suddenly found an occasion to come out?

I could feel the rage building in me.

There was no-one trying to calm things down.

I just knew...

I suppose I just had to say something.

As I'm getting closer, I'm getting more annoyed.

So I got a bit verbal as I hit the corner there.

I'm like, "For God's sake, why are you burning cars?

"These are your neighbours' cars - it doesn't make sense!"

You understand?

The shop up there,

she's working hard to make her business work

and you lot want to go and burn it up - for what?

Just to say that you're warring

and you're bad, man?

This is about a fucking man that got shot in Tottenham,

this isn't about having fun on the road and busting up the place.

Get it real, black people! Get real.

What I like about what you were saying was just the passion,

the raw passion and the energy.

It was the way that you were saying it,

the force of it.

I had no control over my mouth at that point -

it just all came out.

Do it for a cause - if we're fighting for a cause,

let's fight for a fucking cause.

You lot piss me the fuck off!

I'm ashamed to be a Hackney person.

Because we're not all gathering together and fighting for a cause.

We're running down Footlocker and thieving shoes.

Dirty thieves!

I've been to jail. I know what the outcomes are.

I know what kind of obstacles will be facing you

when you come out of jail.

I wanted them to know that.

Pauline's had no idea that her spur of the moment speech

was being captured on camera and shared on YouTube -

just 12 hours later,

over 2 million people around the world

had heard what she had to say.

Do you think your speech did make a difference?

I think to some degree it did.

People said to me it was kind of at that point

when people started coming out with their brooms -

everyone started standing up for their communities a bit more.

You were the voice of decency

in amongst a lot of chaos for a moment.

The voice of decency with a few indecent words!

THEY LAUGH

Pauline's speech genuinely rolled out of her mouth,

instant and spontaneous.

But for most, a good speech needs application,

time, effort and careful thought to be a success.

All great orators completely understand

the importance of engaging with an audience.

This goes beyond ransacking the thesaurus for the right word,

or structuring the argument -

this is about when and how and where.

First, you need to think about...

Preparation -

it's almost impossible to put too much stress

on this subject of preparation,

because lack of preparation usually means confusion.

Then you need to decide on a location.

From Jesus' Sermon on the Mount...

..to the first ever TV broadcast from Number Ten,

you have to find the right platform that suits your speech

and appeals to your audience.

Oh, there you are.

You can see what it's like - the camera's hot, probing eye,

these monstrous machines and their attendants.

A kind of 20th century torture chamber,

that's what it is.

But I must try and forget all this paraphernalia

and imagine that you are sitting here in the room with me.

Hello?

'And finally, with all speeches,

'wherever you decide to expound your ideas from,

'if you don't deliver it with a sense of drama,

'if you don't project,

'you might as well be talking to yourself.'

Ha-he-hi-ho-hu!

A-E-I-O-U.

When asked to name the three most important elements of oratory,

the Ancient Greek scholar, Demosthenes,

is said to have replied, "Delivery, delivery, delivery."

In other words, success or failure will ultimately depend

on how you deliver the argument.

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,

where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

To get a few tips on how to deliver a speech with conviction,

I am with an expert - Shakespearian actor Charles Dance.

And what have kings that privates have not too,

save ceremony, save general ceremony?

And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?

What kind of god art thou,

that suffer'st more of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?

What are thy rents? What are thy comings in?

O, ceremony, show me but thy worth!

Art thou aught else but place, degree and form,

creating awe and fear in other men,

wherein thou art less happy, being feared,

than they in fearing?

What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,

but poisoned flattery?

O, be sick, great greatness, and bid thy ceremony give thee cure!

And it goes on.

If somebody came to you as a complete beginner,

looking for advice about how to give a speech,

is there a crude list of dos and don'ts

that you could give them?

It's a great mistake

to actually try to hit particular things in a speech, you know.

I mean, you'd give words that were there for a purpose

the emphasis they deserve, but not to colour them,

because if you're saying things like

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more",

or "Close the wall up with their English dead",

you don't need to colour any of those things.

You don't need to hit "dead" or "once more unto the BREACH",

or anything like that.

You just deliver that energy. Great thing, energy.

If you haven't got it,

then go and do ten press-ups in the wings before you come on.

It's a bit like a pressure cooker -

the energy's in there and the lid is screwed down tight.

You let it out at the pace you want to let it out.

You don't - "whoomph!" - let it all go immediately.

But you have to keep that energy level running, all the time.

-What about pauses and silences?

-They're there for a purpose.

They're there just to give the audience a little breather

and perhaps think about what's been said

and prepare them for what's about to be said.

Don't speak at the same pace right the way through,

just find a point where you can hurry through

to the next point you want to make,

then when you get to that point, make it.

And then a little pause, for a dramatic impetus or whatever,

and then carry on again.

So it's changes of pace. It's energy. It's confidence. Diction as well.

Um...because, you know,

you want people to hear what you're saying

and so hit those consonants, hit those diphthongs,

make those vowels nice, open and wide.

-Clarity, isn't it?

-Clarity.

Is it a good idea to try and use this space?

It's no good, coming onto the stage

and being kind of shy and retiring and, you know,

"I don't really want to be here tonight

"and I'll kind of stand over here in the corner, or something."

No - you just have to have that confidence thing

and come out and plant your feet and there you are.

What about volume?

Looking out there, that is an enormous cavity,

a huge space to fill.

It's pitch, more than volume,

and making sure that what's coming out of your mouth

is backed up with breath and it's in the front of your mouth

and you're lifting it.

It's an old, old actor said to me, one night...

I was pretty down,

maybe I'd had shit reviews or something, you know,

and it was a struggle.

And he said, "Lift up your head and lift up your heart", he said.

And it's true - once you lift it up and don't get all kind of down here,

because all those people can see is the top of your head,

you really have got to say "hello" to those people.

Great delivery comes in many guises.

Someone well-versed in the skills of rhetoric

can have fun with speech making -

cleverly appearing to be bumbling and irreverent,

yet giving a resounding performance.

Speaking as a spectator,

you produced such paroxysms of tears and joy

on the sofas of Britain

that you probably not only inspired a generation,

but helped to create one as well

and propelled...I can get away with that.

And you did rack up more medals than France, didn't you?

-AUDIENCE:

-Yes!

-Yes!

And more medals than Germany, and more medals than Australia,

more medals, ladies and gentlemen, more medals, my friends, per head

than virtually any country on Earth.

Boris Johnson cleverly tapped into a nation's collective euphoria

after the 2012 Olympics.

Here, in September 1997, one man went much further,

capturing a tragic mood that had gripped the British public.

He decided to boldly speak out and to hell with the consequences.

Great oratory can always send a shiver down the spine,

but a speech only becomes great

when it chimes with the times into which it is delivered

and that was certainly true of Earl Spencer's speech

when he gave the oration here in Westminster Abbey

at his sister's funeral.

I stand before you today,

the representative of a family in grief,

in a country in mourning,

before a world in shock.

The duty, I felt, was to speak for somebody

who I love very much who had died and therefore hadn't got a voice.

One thing that really struck me at the time,

as I watched you making that speech,

was how you'd managed to balance the private things

with those public concerns as well.

Immediately after Diana's death,

we started getting hundreds of letters here from the public,

sort of cries from the heart from them, really.

I knew various things were troubling them

about how Diana would be remembered,

so I did listen to that voice from the public

that was fairly consistent.

For all the status, the glamour, the applause,

Diana remained throughout a very insecure person at heart,

almost childlike in her desire to do good for others.

Due to the shocking circumstances of Diana's death,

naturally there was speculation over what her brother, Earl Spencer,

was going to say.

And a day before the funeral,

he attended a rehearsal at the abbey.

I was conscious of people in the abbey

who were obviously very interested in what I was going to say.

They said they wanted it for level. I didn't believe them.

I just felt it was such a personal speech, actually,

so I pretended I had left the speech behind,

and read from a hymnbook.

I literally read one word, and they went, "That's fine."

LAUGHING: So...I was probably right.

There is no doubt that she was looking

for a new direction in her life at this time.

She talked endlessly of getting away from England,

mainly because of the treatment that she received

at the hands of the newspapers.

I don't think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions

were sneered at by the media,

why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf

to bring her down.

My own - and only - explanation

is that genuine goodness is threatening

to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum.

It is a point to remember that, of all the ironies about Diana,

perhaps the greatest is this -

a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting

was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.

I suddenly sensed that this wasn't going to plan.

That this was...

He...was breaking the rules

and this wasn't...this wasn't an ordinary funeral.

There was bitterness and rancour,

and he was opposite the royal family and they were the targets.

Indeed, behind him were the press, who were also his targets.

I had the, um...the certainty of knowing that

I was saying what Diana would have wanted to be said.

If that came off as in any way confrontational elsewhere,

that was really a by-product.

It wasn't an intention in its own right.

And that's...that's just honestly the truth.

I wasn't looking for a fight.

I was just saying things as I saw them.

On behalf of your mother and sisters,

I pledge that we, your blood family,

will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way

in which you were steering these two exceptional young men.

That moment, when you suddenly realise you've been...ambushed,

as it were, you've been taken out of your comfort zone

and something else is happening.

The real guts of his attack on the royal family and the press

and his defence of Diana was in tune with what people felt.

I would like to end by thanking God

for the small mercies He has shown us at this dreadful time,

for taking Diana at her most beautiful and radiant

and when she had joy in her private life.

It was much harder than I had realised

to speak across the coffin of my sister

looking at her young sons, you know - that was terrible.

Above all, we give thanks for the life of a woman

I am so proud to be able to call my sister -

the unique, the complex,

the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana,

whose beauty, both internal and external,

will never be extinguished from our minds.

As he reached the climactic criticisms

and the defence of Diana as a sort of saintly figure,

the first thing I heard

was what sounded like a very distant shower of rain.

The rain seemed to be coming closer,

and then it seemed to be at the very doors of the abbey

and I realised it was applause.

Well, you don't applaud at funerals - it is not done.

There was a sort of hiatus

when the clapping was continuing outside

and then it came into the abbey.

A moving tribute from Charles, Earl Spencer.

And spontaneous applause breaks out in Westminster Abbey.

That was spine-tingling stuff.

I mean, that was a real emotional moment,

where, effectively, Spencer had leapt over us all,

spoke over all our heads

and brought the people outside in with the speech.

He turned the emotions of the people into the official narrative,

and I thought that was an extraordinary moment.

He spoke from the heart.

He voiced all our opinions, all our views

and I'm sure, you know,

I think a lot of people really respected him for it.

He said a lot of things that we all felt,

but not very many people dared to say them

in the circumstances in which he said them.

I do think the press have backed off much more than they would've done,

not necessarily because of my speech

but because of the way their mother died.

But maybe the speech just pushed it back under their noses,

"This is what you did and you won't do it again."

I think the press would not, now...

..hound anybody as they hounded Princess Diana,

but equally, nobody in the royal family

would manipulate the press as Diana did.

No regrets?

I have never regretted it for a second,

on any level at all.

Delighted to have got through it, and...

..pleased that I didn't compromise.

We've seen how the right words, a strong argument,

powerful delivery charged with emotion,

can inspire action.

Great oratory can even change the mindset of a nation.

And for me, they all come together in this spectacular speech.

I have a dream...

..that one day, on the red hills of Georgia...

..the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners

will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream...

I just never get tired of listening to that speech,

and watching it.

Every time, it sends shivers up and down my spine.

With this faith,

we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation

into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

With this faith,

we will be able to work together, to pray together,

to struggle together, to go to jail together,

to stand up for freedom together...

There's something of the gospel in here,

there's something of the litany,

it's evangelical.

..that my four little children will one day live in a nation

where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin,

but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

The way that phrase is both a suffix and prefix

to some of those sentences.

I have a dream that one day...

There's these little pauses where you're invited to have your dream.

One day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls

will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls

as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

The Greek philosopher Longinus

said that "the effect of elevated language upon an audience

"is not persuasion but transport."

And for me, that transportation has got to come in the form of metaphor

and rhythm and intensity.

In other words, it's got to be something poetic.

..when we allow freedom to ring,

when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet,

from every state and every city,

we will be able to speed up that day

when all of God's children, black men and white men,

Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics,

will be able to join hands

and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,

"Free at last! Free at last!

"Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd