Peter Viney's Blog

Cheltenham Town Hall

Friday 21st April 2023

19.30 – 21.00 (strictly)

It’s a familiar location. We like Cheltenham. Karen used to stay with her granny here and went to primary school here for a few months between Belfast and Bournemouth. We’ve been to several Cheltenham Literary Festivals in this hall. We were keen to see Fran Lebowitz on her UK speaking tour. She’s 72,  she knew Andy Warhol, she was part of the New York art scene. She’s renowned as an acerbic commentator and humorist.

Cheltenham Town Hall

Trouble was it was a Literary Festival style presentation at its worst, not that it was a festival with multiple talks, but just one talk in the day. We had half an hour of her sitting in a low chair while an interviewer asked her inane questions about Cheltenham and GCHQ (I couldn’t know less, she responded) and then on Prince Harry. I was thinking, this was a woman who knew the whole Warhol NYC scene. at a crucial period Why do we want to know what she thinks about Prince Harry?

Then she went to the lectern for questions from the audience and the interviewer left the stage. They had decided not to have someone with a mic moving round the audience. People just spoke from their seats. I would have asked the questioners to stand at least. Mostly we couldn’t hear the questions at all, especially as she only selected people from near the front and we were in Row N, past the halfway gap between rows. So questioners had their backs to us, and to half of the audience. Often she couldn’t hear the questions either. She was supposed to repeat the questions, but forgot half the time and just started answering, though to be honest, she was bending her replies into tried and tested routines. I’ve done Q & As at the end of talks many times. You’ll have maybe twenty set-pieces and fit some of them to five reasonably close questions that come up. This is often unconscious. We compared her to John Lydon  who had a similar speaking tour format (30 minute interview plus questions) but Lydon had an interviewer who did all the talks on the tour, and who stayed on stage to supervise and repeat if need be the audience questions. That’s the better way to do it.

She has image. The main issue for someone who makes a living from public speaking, is that she has weak presentation skills. Her microphone technique is breathy, she gabbles,  and she has little idea about projection and none on pausing or timing. Well one bit of timing was perfect, she finished dead on 21.00 as advertised. The effect was exacerbated by the drive to Cheltenham, when we listened to five professional actors telling anecdotes about filming “Sharpe” in Crimea. Their timing and pausing was superb. I have taught public speaking and presentation,  and in spite of her constant lecture tours, she does not have honed skills … for example she was also poor at scanning the crowd for raised hands and looking as if she was selecting from the whole hall. I’d compare Bob Dylan who has the same compulsion on keeping on touring, and who also can’t cut it anymore. He’s fine on the recent narrative material, but so painful on anything older with a melody line. She could easily sustain 45 minutes on radio with a professional interviewer. Not 90 minutes in a hall. 

The Town Hall had a massive audio set up with huge monitors facing the two seated speakers, but the sound was not good on spoken voice- it looked like a music set up to me. Hand-held mics were odd, modern technology would allow a mic pinned to the clothes for this sort of allegedly informal talk, then a fixed mic at the lectern (which it had). I’ll concede that the hall looks difficult for sound. She would probably be better in a smaller modern theatre with raked seating and good sound.

A lot was tedious, what with not knowing anything about which question she was answering. I heard her talking about an album with a man in a dress, but hadn’t caught any mention of David Bowie. I was bored much of the time. Some bits were good- Warhol, obviously. She was funny and memorable on Trump, de Santis and on Joe Biden. I loved her line that even property developers looked down on Trump in New York, where he was a joke. Some bits got lots of laughter, many bits didn’t as she spoke about people I’d never heard of. She had long lines waiting for signed copies afterwards. We’ve got her book. We didn’t join the queue.

I thought back to others in the same Town Hall. Roddy Doyle was worse, much worse in that he also badly alienated the audience, which she never did. She had likability.

In other events at the past festivals, I hated the format where authors just turned up, expected to be asked questions and assumed it would just happen. Ian Hislop was guilty on that too. In contrast Will Self, Douglas Coupland and Alexander McCall Smith all gave a rehearsed and skilled presentation. McCall Smith is a trained lawyer and lecturer on law. Self put on an act full of energy in this same space. No, I don’t like their books much, but that’s not the point. At £35 a head, you have to compare seeing a theatre play (Salisbury was £28 a week or so ago) with a cast of nine actors, music, lights and weeks of rehearsal. I thought this event was a rip-off. We always enjoy Cheltenham, but her talk was a very disappointing end to the day. We did resolve, ‘No more literary festivals.’