Not Your Normal TED Talk

In 2012, I was asked to take part in a TEDx event. TEDx is an independently organised event under the TED banner. This particular session was called “Whitehall Women”.

It was a collaboration between Whitehall and Washington, with an audio-visual link between the two locations.

I was known for my writing, speaking, and teaching, so I accepted, relatively blind to the fact that I would be forever captured doing my talk. They asked me to speak on my unfinished book, The Kama Sutra of Work. Although it was a year away from being published, there was enough for me to make a sharp 18-minute presentation - the standard TED length. 

TEDx talks today are very tightly managed to ensure the highest quality; things were a little looser then, and, to be fair, the technology for the cross-Atlantic collaboration wasn’t at the level we have now. (My son did a TEDx talk in Warwick earlier this year, and the careful editing and presentation was light years better. To be fair, his talk would always have been better than mine, even if he’d filmed it in his bedroom on an iPhone.. I’ll put the link up when it’s posted.)

A talk today would be reviewed by the people running the event, feedback given, multiple drafts passed back and forth along with advice on visuals and presentation, to ensure a talk worthy of TED production values.

Okay, hands up. I didn’t prepare rigorously enough either. So when the live (and crucial) feed between Washington and Whitehall went down, the running order found itself with large gaps.  There was an audience in London, having heard the first few speakers, expecting to hear talks streamed from Washington, and nothing was forthcoming.

When the organisers asked the remaining, waiting London speakers if anyone could extend their up-coming talk to fill the time until the link with Washington could be recovered, I - for a reason that still escapes me - put up my hand.. The others, whose eyes had been firmly glued to the floor, sighed with relief. They were wiser than me.

Stupidly, I thought I could extend a less-than-tightly-prepared 18-minute presentation to……well, however, long was required. That said, I’ve always been able to extemporise in an emergency, and in the normal. course of events that’s fine. It’s not being recorded for posterity in one of the most prestigious speaking events in the world (even TEDx has cachet); its just me and a room of. people, enjoying ourselves..

Sadly, the cameraman, flustered with the unravelling tech link and under a table fiddling with wires, didn’t hear the organiser’s introduction to me, totally missed me stepping onto the stage, and failed to start recording when opened my mouth, so the recording starts like I was shot out of a cannon. It then wanders a wee bit towards the end when I was having to make things up, and stops rather abruptly when they wound me up because they were connected to the US again!

So there we are, a living example of a much younger me, taking a risk, not necessarily getting it perfectly right but not getting it totally wrong either. A metaphor for life.

I’m conflicted about this video now. A part of me hates that I hadn’t thought through the narrative arc properly, and had been more interested in what I wanted to say than what I was trying to give the audience. I could have been so much better, they could have got so much more.

But another part looks at that 60-year-old me and is pleased that I am still living those words.

I’m still working, still learning, still teaching. So it’s true to me, warts and all.