Speech of the Month, August 2026 - Geoff Norcott

Because I have a horrible habit of waking up at 3am, I've found a podcast is the best thing for lulling me back to sleep. Without one, I'll start going through the to-do list — mentally — and fretting about which of my friends really like me. What tends to happen is I drop off to one podcast and, if all goes well, wake up to another at around 6.45. It's through this routine that I came across Geoff Norcott's What Most People Think podcast, and I rather like it.

If you've yet to have the pleasure, knock yourself out...

I like it because, unlike so many other political podcasts that feel too outraged, too sanctimonious, or just too pleased with themselves, Norcott's is a blummin' good laugh — and I happen to think laughter's a little lacking during the times we're living through. Here's why I think the pod works, and what we can all learn from it:

He imposes a grammar on his show

From "piss-take prices" to "thank you and f*ck you," before diving into no more than two political stories of the week, the pod has regular features that the initiated come to expect and, therefore, look forward to. Listeners can even email in with their own piss-take prices, which makes the feature interactive - having recently been charged £50 to have the hem on a skirt turned up, I should write in myself.

Likewise, we should think about the distinctive parts a presentation would benefit from if it's one we give regularly - the weekly update, say, or the quarterly report. Establish a grammar for it. Keep most of it serious, but don't forget that a bit of pathos through humour works well in work presentations - a "cock-up of the month" or "cheekiest client of the season" could add some welcome light relief to a largely informative address.

Once he gets to the news story, he's right into it

There's no five-minute preamble about his week, his tour, his kids. He's straight into the story everyone's already half-following, and he assumes you know roughly what happened. He's not there to brief you, he's there to translate.

This is a lesson a lot of presenters resist. We think we need to 'warm the room' before we get to the point. Often the opposite is true: if your audience already has one foot in the topic, respect that and meet them there. Preamble is for when people need orientating. If they don't, it just delays the bit they came for.

He names the thing everyone's thinking but not saying

The show's whole premise is in the title. Norcott's trick isn't being outrageous. It's being the person in the room who says the sentence that's been hovering, unspoken, for the last five minutes.

This is worth stealing for any presentation. Audiences don't warm to speakers who are performing an opinion; they warm to speakers who articulate a feeling the room already has, just more precisely than the room could manage itself. Find the sentence people are almost saying, and say it first.

His register never changes, whatever the subject

He'll go from a light dig at Ed Davey's dancing or Andy Burnham's zip-up polo shirt to a genuinely pointed line about the state failing white working-class boys, all in the same conversational tone. Nothing is signposted with a "but seriously, though" - the delivery does the work of telling you when something matters.

This is a harder skill than it looks, and it's the one that separates comedians who can do serious content from comedians who can only do bits. If you constantly shift gears — jokey voice, then Serious Voice, then back — your audience starts anticipating the gear change rather than listening to the content. Keeping one register and letting the material carry the shift in tone is far more persuasive, because nothing about your delivery is telling the audience how to feel before they've had the chance to feel it themselves.

His impressions are impressive

It's a basic point, but as I mentioned in last month's post, most of us are suckers for a genuinely convincing impression. His Starmer is excellent, and his Burnham's not bad either, though it's no match for Jon Culshaw's.

Is there much to learn from this? If you can do a dead-ringer impression of your boss or the CEO, should you deploy it in a presentation? Perhaps - but only if you're addressing an internal audience who'll actually get the joke.