Clarkson gave business presenters a valuable lesson in editing. Now he needs to relearn the art of ‘Killing your Darlings’

So The Grand Tour, Clarkson, Hammond & May’s new post-Top Gear show, has finally hit our screens, albeit via an Amazon Firestick, and the ‘Terrible Trio’ have many reasons to be rather pleased with themselves. The bits in the tent need tightening up and they should make better use of their chosen location, but the films are magnificent – with one little quibble that harks back to a lesson for business presenters.

In my Presentation Skills sessions the subject of editing tends to loom large, especially when I am helping start ups with their investor pitches. I explain to the presenters that they simply know ‘too much’ about their topic. They have been fully immersed in that topic for months, if not years, so understandably want their audience to hear the full story, complete with all the intricacies on which they have laboured so long. The trouble is that the audience will be hearing it for the first time and have yet to develop any interest at all; at this stage they probably need a version that has been highly simplified. Really it needs an outsider (someone like me!) to look at the situation in an objective manner. Only then can you overcome what the psychologists call the ‘Curse of Knowledge’ – knowing too much to be able to explain something to people hearing it for the first time!

One of the techniques I recommend as a cure for this curse is to adopt the film makers’ approach to editing which is so ruthless that they call it ‘Killing your Darlings’. They go to all the trouble to writing dialogue, acting it out and filming it, only for much of the resulting footage to end up on the cutting room floor. The need to fill very specific time allocations and to hit commercial breaks at pivotal moments is part of what drives this approach, but it is more nuanced than that. If you watch the deleted scenes on DVDs the director’s voice over will typically include comments such as: “Nice performances from both the lead players here, but it wasn’t moving the story forward. So it had to go.”

Among the best recent endorsements for this ruthless approach to editing happens to be one from Jeremy Clarkson. In a Sunday Times column just after his famous fracas he said: “…every week the films were edited to a length that felt right. They felt balanced. They felt good. But every week there simply wasn’t time to fit them into the programme – so they’d have to be shortened. And without exception they were better as a result.” 

My ‘little quibble’ with The Grand Tour is that, while the films were both beautiful and embraced all that was best about the old Top Gear, they were a little too long. Early reviews seem to agree – The Evening Standard said: ‘segments testing hybrid hyper-cars drag at times’. In The Times, meanwhile: ‘the first sequence is too long…..For a show about speed, this played very slowly to me’.

What seems to have happened is that they have broken free from constraints but, as Clarkson himself said last year, one of those constraints – having to fit into precisely 58 minutes - had actually being doing them a favour. When broadcasting on the internet no one is putting up a stop sign and you can all-too-easily just keep wandering on.

So Clarkson and producer Andy Wilman need to re-learn the discipline of Killing your Darlings, possibly by doing as I advise business presenters – getting help from a third party who has had nothing to do with the content and so nothing to lose from making a few cuts. Furthermore, they will be seeing it for the first time, so will react much more like the audience will on the big day.

‘Pause for thought’ in a business presentation – your audience’s thoughts, that is - allowing them to sink in

One of most effective of all Presentation Skills techniques happens also to be one of the simplest; and yet it is a technique that many presenters struggle to implement. I am talking about Pauses which, as Khalid Aziz says, have the effect of putting your words ‘into lights’, so adding real impact. In my Presentation Skills coaching sessions I point to two additional benefits. 

First, pauses allow important messages to ‘sink in’ and register properly with your audience, who are probably hearing them for the first time. Too many presenters tend to be focused on simply getting through their presentation, so they ‘plough on’, giving equal weight and emphasis to everything they say. I find myself responding: “Hang on a minute; somewhere in there you made brief reference to the ‘highest rental rates ever achieved’, but you said it in a rather mater of fact way and moved on too swiftly to various bits of minutiae. If you have a record achievement to report, let’s dwell on that for a moment, with a bit of emphasis, a display of excitement and then a pause – to let that important message sink in.

The second additional benefit of pauses is that they can help with your overall pacing. Many people speak too fast when they present, certainly as they open – partly because their heart is pumping a bit faster at that nervy moment, so their speech speeds up as well. There are various methods to tackle nerves, but if you plan and implement pauses around key words, then together with the benefits already discussed, you will soon find your rate of speech coming down to a much more measured pace. And if you work at this, you have the beginnings of gravitas.

So pauses are one of the most useful and impactful tools in the business presenter’s toolbox – you only have to look at any Steve Jobs video to see how much he liked to deploy the pause.  And yet most people are afraid to pause – they almost shudder at the thought of creating a ‘vacuum’ that must surely be filled as quickly as possible. Some of the best interviewers, of course, exploit this fear when asking difficult questions. They simply wait for an answer that eventually comes, but mainly because the interviewee can’t bear the prevailing silence.

The only way to overcome this fear is to start experimenting with pauses – in a planned way - and studying how others use them, both when speaking and in other fields. At The Magic Circle, for instance, when we are being taught tricks, the advice around the big ‘ta dah’ moment is often: “Having done that, do nothing else. Just allow the moment to sink in.” Dynamo, of course, takes this approach to an extreme, by simply walking way from his audience, allowing them to focus fully on the amazement he has just created.

In music, meanwhile, no one is completely sure whether Miles Davis actually said: “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play”, but somehow the attribution feels right. What I can be sure of – having seen for myself recently on a Sky Arts interview - is that Jeff Beck said: “Silence is gold dust. The trouble is that people don’t know when to shut up.”

Prof Khalid Aziz is Chairman of Aziz Corporate, the executive business & leadership coaching company