Saturday, September 11, 2010

Sainsbury's

We're gearing up for the British Science Festival now. This takes place next week in Birmingham and will be, I am reliably informed, a bit of a 'media frenzy'.

The press launch was on Thursday in the nice part of the RI. Lots of people were there, including Pallab Ghosh from the BBC. This is the second time I've been in a press conference and turned around to a voice I recognised before realising that I knew the speaker from radio 4, not real life. Vivienne Parry from Inside the Ethics Committee, was the other, in case you're interested. Neither look anything like expected, although as soon as I say that I start to wonder exactly what it was I was expecting them to look like.

The press launch was a very odd affair. Or at least I found it that way. Maybe these things happen all the time and are totally normal.

First off Lord Sainsbury, a science minister in the last government, gave a summary of his presidential address. He his president of the British Science Association, who run the festival. He will give a presidential address next week during the festival. He gave the press a summary of the address the week before. Does that sound weird to you?


His summary was full of "I will say this, then summarise that, then use the following examples to illustrate that....".

This clearly is how the Today programme can report that so and so will tell ministers today that... But I hadn't quite appreciated exactly how formal the whole thing was. What about if you're a super last minute person and don't have your speech ready until 2 minutes before delivery? What are you supposed to say at the press briefing then?

By the way, this is all strictly embargoed until 0001hrs on Tuesday 14th September.

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