James Landale

Do we play music now or what do we do?

regal speech regal texts yeah I always like to do that because although you can watch them and that you've really got to watch them just to sort of hear and see the delivery but also you want to sometimes just go back and count how many times you mentioned NATO and how many jokes there were and things like that and I you know I'm just old-fashioned I'd like a bit of paper rather than constantly scrolling up it's not on vellum though is it

It's not on vellum, but you know, I forgot to bring my vellum notebook with me.

What's really interesting is the Congress speech is really hard because of the constant interruption.

Speeches are living, breathing things.

They're lectures and they have a rhythm and a pace to them.

And when you're sort of rehearsing them, there's, you know, I've given a few of my time not to Congress.

um yeah yeah there's a sort of flow but if you deliver a sentence then suddenly the entire audience stands up and claps for sort of 30 seconds you sort of there's an endless stop start and you could see there are a couple of times where the king sort of went come on just just let me get on he has a way of putting his hand up where he's sort of acknowledging it but also saying sit down yeah yeah yeah you know sit down sit down sit down you're rocking the boat uh and so i think that uh

you know, there was a little bit of that going on, but he sort of, you know, he pressed on because sometimes, you know, they interrupted a sentence to applaud, but he was quite clever.

I noticed that he would nip back and repeat the previous half sentence before diving into the next one, just to sort of keep the stitch going.

So I thought- Someone who knows what a soundbite is.

Exactly, exactly.

And so I thought that was good.

I mean, you know, the King is very good at delivering jokes.

He knows how to do sort of deadpan self-deprecation.

He also knows how to keep going when a joke doesn't land, because not every joke lands.

There's always a slight sort of gap between English humor and American humor, and however good you are, there are always going to be moments where people just simply won't understand what you're talking about.

And there were a couple of occasions where you could tell the audience didn't understand what he was talking about.

There's a certain element of...

of irony, of sarcasm, that just doesn't quite cross the Atlantic.