Pursuits: The teleprompter was not invented for newsreaders but for actors in soap operas

Do you know what a teleprompter is? I’m guessing that you have some idea of what the device does.

But unless you are in the news – or politics – business, you probably don’t know what exactly it is. Frankly neither did I. Even though I have had to use the damn thing several times in my career –I hate it! – I had no idea of its origins until I read a piece in a September issue of The New Yorker about politics and the teleprompter.

 

   It turns out that the teleprompter was not invented, as I had always imagined, for newsreaders but for actors in soap operas. American daytime soap operas (stuff like As The World Turns, General Hospital, The Bold and the Beautiful etc.) are second to none in their awfulness. Almost without exception, they are rubbish, written by hacks, acted by no-hopers, and shot quickly because they have to telecast a new episode every weekday. In these circumstances, it is impossible for the actors to learn new lines every day, especially as the scripts are often written or changed just hours before each episode is filmed.

 

   The teleprompter helped you to read while looking straight at camera, it made it appear to the uninitiated that you were either speaking from memory (as actors should) or making it up as you spoke (as politicians should).

 

   The first people to see the point of a teleprompter were newsreaders on TV. Till the 1950s (the 1960s in England and the late 1980s in India), newsreaders read the news from a script that was printed out and given to them. This looked strange and so many newsreaders tried to memorize as much of the news as they could.

 

   For politicians the problems were more acute. In India many politicians still speak from the heart or at the very least write their own speeches. But in the US, it has been decades since a senior elected official wrote his own speeches. It is hard to think of a single memorable thing said by a US President that was not written for him by somebody else. (And that includes all the famous lines from J.F. Kennedy’s, “Ask not what your country can do for you” to Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook”)

 

   Because US politicians are, at heart, readers and therefore vocalisers of other people’s lines (and sometimes, ideas) the teleprompter offered an ideal way of making sense by reading without the added inconvenience of actually having to think sensibly. The New Yorker reminds us that midway through his speech at the 1952 Republican Convention, President  Herbert Hoover began speaking very, very slowly and then muttered “this damn thing – I could do better without it”.

 

   Hoover was part of a generation that had grown up speaking from the heart or reading from bits of paper so he loathed the idea of a teleprompter. His successors have, however, been quick to grasp the advantages of the teleprompter. When Barrack Obama speaks in public, his staff place three or four teleprompters all around the hall. This allows Obama to look around and still find the prompter.

 

"On TV, the greatest contribution of the prompter – or the autocue as it is also called – has been to take TV news out of the hands of journalists and place it in the hands of pretty or glamorous announcers who have to do no more than stare at the autocue and read out whatever appears there."

   Other politicians are not so adept at using the prompter. For instance, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh addresses the nation on TV, one reason why he seems so stiff is because he is concentrating on reading the Doordarshan teleprompter that has been placed in front of him.

 

   Of course, relying on a prompter can put politicians in vulnerable places. Obama was foxed when an operator fed the wrong speech into his teleprompter on one occasion. At the 2008 Republican Convention, Sarah Palin had difficulty with her speech because the teleprompter operator rushed ahead of her and the words disappeared from the screen even before she had finished saying them.

 

   As you’ve probably guessed, the so-called witty lines that presenters deliver at the Oscars and the Emmys are written for them by professional gag-writers and then put on a teleprompter. At last month’s Emmy awards, Tina Fey joked about this, deliberately misreading lines from the teleprompter because, she said, she had left her glasses at home.

 

   On TV, the greatest contribution of the prompter – or the autocue as it is also called – has been to take TV news out of the hands of journalists and place it in the hands of pretty or glamorous announcers who have to do no more than stare at the autocue and read out whatever appears there. In the UK, newsreaders who have been hired for their looks rather than their journalistic skills are called auto-cuties.

 

   Most real TV journalists hate the prompter though nobody can dispute that it serves a purpose. I never use one if I can help it (and when I do have to use it at live events this leads to much embarrassment when I cannot read the screen properly without my glasses – my own Tina Fey moment). In India, the likes of Rajdeep Sardesai, Vikram Chandra or Sagarika Ghose will use the prompter as a sort of lists of notes, in case they go blank, but will generally speak extempore. Barkha Dutt hardly ever looks at her prompter and nor, I suspect, does Arnab Goswami (though I have never been in his studio).

 

   But there are enough singers who have taken to prompters for their performances to make up for the hatred some TV journos feel towards auto-cues. Most music performers of a certain age – James Taylor, Barbra Streisand – use prompters because they can’t always remember the words to their old songs.

 

   And more and more actors – outside of daytime soaps – like having their lines on a prompter. But before you get too sniffy about this, remember that the great Marlon Brando used to insist on having his lines written on large cue cards and held up on the sets as he did his scenes.

 

   He was an actor, he said, not a memoriser. He wanted to focus on acting, not on remembering.

 

   Somebody should offer those words to Obama as his defence for the next time he is accused of being an autocue-president.