Contest Report for 21 September 2015

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After a last-minute change of venue, Bloomsbury Speakers’ autumn contest night was opened by Helen in the dual role of club president and contest chair for the first of the night’s contests.

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Humorous Speech Contest

With the order of speakers determined earlier by a random draw, the Humorous Speech contest was started by Samuel with his speech “Finding the Fire”. Sharing funny anecdotes from two of the worst jobs in his career, Samuel encouraged us to consider what it is we’d do for free in order to find our own ‘fire’ within us.

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In her speech, “Sleep Your Way to Success”, Svetlana used humorous albeit dubious facts about the benefits of sleep to explain how it might help us overcome all our problems.

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Paul‘s speech, “Wipe-out”, recounted his surfing trip to Cornwall with work colleagues. Using his storytelling skills entwined with physical comedy, Paul described his hopeless struggle to even get over the very first challenge – putting the wet-suit on!

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In Peter F‘s speech – simply entitled “Public Speaking” – he told us about some of the occasions where addressing an audience proved even more challenging than usual – including being baffled by hecklers at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park.

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Finally, in her speech “Three Essential Skills While Travelling”, Olga shared the tale of a trip to Greece with her family that was memorable for all the wrong reasons!

Table Topics Contest

After a short break, Rufina took to the stage to chair the Table Topics contest. All of the contestants were given the same topic to speak about for 1-2 minutes: “What would you do if you were Mayor of London?”

Svetlana, Peter R, Olga, Matt, Helen and Peter F each addressed the audience with their individual responses to the question. Answers included hiring a DJ to keep morning commuters entertained and making sure all election promises are fulfilled, even if they contradict each other!

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Results

After the judges’ votes had been counted and verified, the contest chairs returned to the stage to present the winners with their awards.

In the Table Topics contest, the results were:

  • Third place – Matt
  • Second place – Peter R
  • First place – Helen

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The results of the Humorous Speech contest were:

  • Third place – Svetlana
  • Second place – Samuel
  • First place – Olga

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Next Round

Congratulations to Olga and Helen who will now go on to represent Bloomsbury Speakers at the Area 34 finals on Thursday, 1st October. Please go along and show your support!

Next Meeting

Our next regular meeting is this Monday, 28th September, upstairs at The Clerk & Well pub, 156 Clerkenwell Road, EC1R 5DU. Doors open at 6:30pm.

Meeting 24th August 2015

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Svetlana, our Toastmaster for the evening set the theme of Summer and August but as president Helen said, it looked like summer was over by the down pour outside as the Bloomsbury Toastmasters huddled in for this week’s speeches!

Carlos did an excellent Icebreaker speech about being Columbian regaling us with tales of his grandfather’s drinking games.
?Robert talked about the ‘Importance of being Ernest’ – using a love of Oscar Wilde and his fav Wilde play to give us a philosophical speech about how he’s prepping for his job interview and not beating himself up.??Sheldon gave a fab speech (that turned out to be the winning one of the evening) about Confirmation Bias and being careful what you look for, with concluding words; “Be careful what you look for in this world as you’ll probably find it!” gave great food for thought.??The final prepared speech was another insightful topic – Science versus Art – given by Zita. Zita, talked about how we grow up as children and are pigeonholed into arts or science state of mind but invited us to question this traditional school of thought and perhaps free ourselves of the?“fetters of characterisation”??Svetlana’s encouraging summary talked of Intellectual speeches being emotional and inspirational, whilst relaying and reminding us that ‘we all have public speakers inside us.’ Nice.
?It was great to see a number of new faces with lots of guests attending this evening’s Toastmasters, from all over the world, from San Francisco to Australia!

Michelle, Swarajit and Olga gave great evaluations of the prepared speeches, reminding speakers to use the stage more and commending on great use of language.

Paul’s use of ‘Tables’ as the subject matter for Table Topics was in genius, and must have been a first for Bloomsbury! Winning Table Topics speaker was Peter who talked of the most historical table in history being his!
?Carrie won best evaluator by giving a fantastic Table Topics evaluation of all our guest speakers that stepped up and took part
?Timekeeper this week was Sarah; Sarah did a fab job of keeping it brief and being to the point. A real must for all timekeepers!

Emma this week’s Grammarian reported 5 uses of word inertia as well as nice uses of metaphors, colourful, inspiring language. Good anecdotes from guest speakers in table topics??Guest Evaluator’s report was insightful with lots of commendations (nice room and vibe, good guest intros) about Bloomsbury and some recommendations for the club (grammarian should make more recommendations – perhaps for speakers to not repeat words too much)

Helen concluded the meeting with giving out the awards, flagging the roles that are open on the committee and reminding us about the contests and Lynne’s workshop

Next Meeting Monday 14th September 2015 at the Clerk and Well 156 Clerkenwell Rd, London EC1R 5DU
Doors open at 6.30pm