wedding speech Archives -

Image by hknong via Morguefile

Sherlock Holmes is wrestling with a difficult problem at 221B Baker Street. So problematic, in fact, that he sends an urgent summons for help to Detective Inspector Lestrade. As Lestrade arrives – with a full backup team, having left a crime in progress – Holmes, played by Benedict Cumberbatch on BBC-TV, holds up a slim book entitled How to Write an Unforgettable Best Man Speech. “This is hard,” he says. “The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

If you should ever need to do that “hardest thing” and make a best man’s speech, don’t rush out to your favourite bookstore, be it Amazon or bricks-and-mortar, to find a copy of that book. Sadly, it doesn’t exist. (I say sadly, because that episode of Sherlock went viral and it would have been a fantastic piece of product placement.)

YOUR OPINION SOUGHT … wedding speeches on screen

A good friend told me that it would be an interesting exercise to analyse that now-famous speech, and I’ve decided to ask my readers for their opinions on it … and on other wedding speeches on screen, both TV dramas and feature films.

There are of course millions of real wedding speeches now on YouTube but I’m looking for fictional ones, because I believe that their lessons are more easily remembered. Benedict Cumberbatch, as Sherlock, has millions of fans (aka Cumberbitches), but that’s not the only reason for writing about his now-famous but fictional speech.

The other reason is that the latest series of the drama has just finished on BBC TV – personally I didn’t like the way they developed this last series but that’s just my opinion, though I know I am not alone – so maybe you fans are suffering withdrawal symptoms.

The Sign of Three: solve a crime or two, write a speech

This speech came, as any Sherlock fan will tell you, in an episode called The Sign of Three, broadcast in 2014. Sherlock has been invited to be Dr Watson’s best man, to his surprise and confusion. Simply writing it is, as he tells D.I. Lestrade, “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

Your turn to comment!

So here’s the survey. What do you think of Sherlock’s speech? If you were planning a best man’s speech, what lessons, if any, would you take from it?

Here is a link to a video of the speech, via our old friends at YouTube:

That link takes you to almost the full speech, apart from a section at the beginning where Sherlock reads out the messages from absent friends; or, as he says: “First things first: telegrams! Well, they’re not actually telegrams; we just call them telegrams. I don’t know why. Wedding tradition, I suppose. Because apparently we don’t have enough of that already.”–

This is all fiction, of course; but I think there are some useful lessons that can be learned from it. Do you agree? If so, what are they? And what do you think about what he does at the very start – reading the so-called ‘telegrams’ – which isn’t in this video?

If you want to see that part too, the only version I found on YouTube isn’t of great quality and has subtitles in Dutch; but here it is.

And for a final piece of background, here’s a transcript of an interview with Steven Moffat, who was Executive Producer of the Sherlock series and who wrote the speech, talking about this episode. He says he always wanted to see Sherlock as a best man. (That idea was his, not Conan Doyle’s: in the original novels, Watson marries Mary Morstan between stories, off-screen so to speak). Moffat’s thoughts are very instructive.

Please post your comments: I’ll post mine soon. I will also post links to posts about this episode by other bloggers, so that you can compare your views with theirs.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

That episode of Sherlock? It’s called The Sign of Three.

Other fictional wedding speeches from movies and TV dramas? I’ll be posting in coming weeks about other onscreen speeches. Watch this space!

Bridal couple against clock face

They say that every picture tells a story. They also say a picture is worth 1000 words. Of course ‘they’ could be wrong; but I now believe the truth of both sayings. You see, I coach speakers; and I’d recently set up a Facebook page for my forthcoming book The Wedding Speaker’s Handbook.

I needed what Facebook calls a ‘cover photo’; that’s the one that goes right across the screen. So I went immediately to morguefile.com, my current go-to site for finding royalty-free pictures. Or at least reasonably-priced pictures. I typed in the search term ‘weddings’ (no flies on me, no sir). And sure enough there were many pictures that could fit the bill, because if there is one thing that weddings reliably produce (apart from happy families, I hear you say), it’s lots of beautiful photographs.

The clock face

However, I then found a wonderful photo of a bride and groom silhouetted against the background of a large clock-face. That clock-face was back-to-front, so you could imagine that they had been shot inside Big Ben or some similarly impressive clock. So I downloaded that picture; by the way it was taken by a photographer and digital media blogger called Ricky Ochs, from Colorado, to whom many thanks.

The questions

Why do I like that picture? It’s because, when I have a decision to make, I have a favourite rhyme which goes like this:

“I keep six honest serving-men.
They taught me all I knew;
Their names are What and Why and When;
And How and Where and Who.”

(Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling)

Answering one or more of those questions – which are, of course, open questions – usually helps me decide.

Here’s what I take from that rhyme, for anyone who is going to speak at a forthcoming event, particularly a wedding. Of those six open questions, you certainly know the Where and When. If it’s a wedding, you probably knew the time and the place very well in advance. In fact the idea for The Wedding Speaker’s Handbook came about when a friend first asked me to help him with a speech for his daughter’s wedding; it was more than a year before the big day. And that sort of lead time is not uncommon.

So Where and When are questions that are generally set in stone a long time in advance. Carrying that information around for a year or more is a potential source of stress for the speaker. So what can you do to reduce your stress, if you are that speaker? The answer, briefly, is that you have to start your planning process now, because it is never too early to start planning a wedding speech. And the remaining four questions in that Kipling rhyme will help the process.

In summary, the picture tells a story for wedding speakers; but it also tells a story for me personally. For those speakers, it’s this: from the moment that the date and venue for ‘The Big Day’ have been booked, the clock is running. It’s running for whoever is planning the wedding – whether that’s the couple themselves, or their families, or a professional wedding planner, or a combination of the above – and it’s running for the speakers. How will those speakers use the time?

For me the clock is running too, if I’m going to get this book ready for the publishers on schedule. Back to work!

Tag Archives: wedding speech

Sherlock’s Hardest Case: How to Write an Unforgettable Best Man Speech

Warning for Wedding Speakers … the Clock is Running Now