Let Me Speak!

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION and you are on to speak-up to the whole world. This privilege becomes headache when you are supposed to speak for an hour or two each and every morning on something NEW. A Morning Show host has a lot on his shoulders. One person running the whole program, where she or (on occasions he) is supposed to be entertaining, swift, cunning and affable at the same time, with the people she or he hardly knows. You need to generate topics, resisting any pause or a “moment of silence” during the conversation and also have to slot-in the audience in the process. Lots of work and one naive soul. A handy mean to ease the workload is to let the other person speak!

Anchoring is a completely different job from acting. A good actor could not necessarily be a good anchor. An actor is supposed to portrait the personality he is playing where as on the other side an anchor needs to depict the personality sitting before him. An anchor should keep his own self at a back and allow the other person to open up. A good host is the one with whom a person feels comfortable to speak. He provides an ambience where the guest feels free and safe to disclose his inner side. But these days the persona of the anchor himself is so swelled up over the show that it overshadows the pitied being of the guest, who despite sharing his own ideas, contentedly or discontentedly ended up nodding with the Anchor Almighty.

It is not that all the anchors of today are the same but most of the cohort is not doing what they are called to do, “to listen” to the person sitting before him. That is not always the fault of the hosts themselves, mostly the producers wish to hire well-known faces rather than well-learned people. Here well-learned means the one who is adequately trained in the genre of hosting. That’s why when they come in front of the camera they don’t have a clue of what they are supposed to do, so they start applying the tactics that they used in their previous old jobs.

Few things to remember which you should avoid while being a Morning Show host and that really infuriate the viewers are: 

·        Don’t interrupt the guest: it hurts when your favorite Caleb faced redundant and irritating interludes while he is about to reveal some attention-grabbing and unknown fact about himself.

·        IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU! Avoid the “what I think” factor from the conversation; because in the rest of the programme, viewers are already forced to listen only about that.

·        Don’t be a Back Seat Driver: He or she has been grown up doing what they are telling you about. Your Fix-it-in-one-day therapy wouldn’t transform them into a new person as they get out of the studio.

·        Stop being controversial all the time: Though the news channels are earning their bread and butter by adding fuel to the fire, but that strategy should only be kept with that particular field.

·        Curiosity Killed the Cat: Provide an air where he feels comfortable enough to share things which he hasn’t expressed before, don’t pinch him to the extent that he gets screwed up!