THE REVIEW OF THE GAME - HELP US TO TAKE ACTION NOW!
Date: 20th May 2022
The latest weekly blog provided to you by our Donald Stewart.
Aftermaths and after dinners
The after-dinner circuit is a minefield.
Many years ago, somebody suggested that I should launch myself into it and try and get a gig as a compere or as someone who could tell a few funny stories and make a killing – the fees are very tempting.
I know my own limits.
I once did an after-dinner speech at a local writer’s awards ceremony. It was not awful, but it was not good. I vowed then never to return to it and never have.
It’s a bear pit existence where you must tread a careful pathway between crudity and taste which is heavy on the former and light on the latter. Your audience are generally half cut. Their ability to discern quality is compromised by the bottles of wine consumed throughout the evening. You can end up either as sugar or keech.
When you are sugar, you get another gig as one of your grateful audience shall recommend you to the next organizing committee of an event telling them that you were good. Fortunate after-dinner speakers are booked annually or regularly.
They are almost exclusively male.
They will almost always “know their audience”.
Sitting through the many courses of food prior to the stage being set they will know that once the call to listen is raised, taste is often discarded. And the assault on your funny bone begins.
Regular organizers know what they are getting.
Anyone who has the responsibility of a massive do, where there is plenty of attention, book people they “know” will suit their audience.
They work hard so that when the guy who was a little bit too risqué last year or did not go down well, gets punted and the guy who knows how to work his audience and slayed them at the last thing I saw which had mixed company, and is within our budget, often gets the gig.
I have seldom seen or heard of a briefing for after dinner speakers. You know how diversity and equality training is now a thing? Never heard of the self-employed being made to prove they can make a diverse crowd comfortable before standing up to speak.
But I know what I know, and I know what material should be in play for an educated group, many of whom will have degrees. And many of the women will be working professionally and not attending as a plus one.
So, for the Scottish Football Writers’ Association not to have considered the progressive moves made by many women in sports journalism before inviting Bill Copeland to speak at their recent dinner appears at worst discriminatory and a message, at best just being out of kilter with their own society.
It seems odd, considering they are supposed to reflect to us the state of our nation, be the commentators who have the pulse of the sport under review and tell US the implications of all things on planet fitba, that they seriously miscalculated.
They went onto book a guy unable to read the diverse society in which we finds ourselves.
Oh, don’t get it wrong. He successfully read the room.
There were plenty in there who hee hawed and laughed their way through their Port and cheese.
And that is the saddest part of it all.
Scotland has a female First Minister. We are well used to hearing female presenters on the TV, and it is 11 years since former Scotland internationalist Andy Gray was sacked with Richard Keays for his comments about a female assistant referee.
11 years.
We have gone a long way in 11 years, but simply, not far enough.
At this point people would normally be shouting for heads to roll and people to be held accountable and saying that the mealy-mouthed apology from the Scottish Football Writers’ Association was not enough to satisfy the crowd.
The fact that a slew of journalists, male and female, condemned and reported the disgrace is the beginning. Training, reality checks, more walkouts and more pressure is needed. Being embarrassed publicly is a start. It is some distance from the end.
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