Carole Cadwalladr 

Observer Ideas 2014: witness the power of words in person

As Conchita Wurst is added to our one-day festival of talks and performances, it’s a good moment to reflect on the power of face-to-face speech, writes Carole Cadwalladr
  
  

Conchita Wurst
Singer Conchita Wurst, the latest addition to the Observer Ideas festival, photographed for the New Review by Phil Fisk in July. Photograph: Phil Fisk/Observer

So, what was X really like? That’s what people ask you when you interview celebs for a living. What was he like? What was she really like? And what I usually say is something like, “she was nice” or “a bit touchy” or “a raving egomaniac” or “mummy issues”. Because you can watch people on TV and read their books but there is still nothing that actually beats being in the same room hearing them and watching them and sniffing the air around them. It’s just different. It’s why phone interviews are rubbish and why politicians shake people’s hands on doorsteps. You get to hear their story from their lips, told in their words, in their way. We are human animals and we respond to other human animals, and when you put enough human animals all together into a very large room, strange and interesting things can happen.

And it’s this very simple, not-that-clever idea that lies behind Observer Ideas. And it’s not even ours. We stole it off TED. Three years ago, we were inspired by TED and its idea of “ideas worth spreading”. It was such a good idea, we thought, that we spread it. When TED launched TEDx, a template that allowed anyone – within certain rules – to host their own TED event, that’s what we did. We brought together scientists and artists and writers and people you’d heard of, and people you’d never heard of, and hired a venue, and then waited, nervously, to see if the thing would end in disaster.

That it didn’t do so had everything to do with the speakers and not a lot to do with us. We simply chose people who we thought had interesting stories, gave them a platform, and then let them get on with it. And that’s what we’re doing again. Two months ago, John Mulholland, the Observer’s editor, introduced our first tranche of speakers for Observer Ideas 2014. Now we have added some more. And if Conchita Wurst doesn’t seem to have all that much in common with David Simon, well, that would be the point. Their stories and ideas are their own, and completely different. To explain how this works, and how powerful it can be, I need to do that thing of telling someone else’s story.

Three weeks before our first TEDxObserver, I interviewed Martine Wright. Martine lost both her legs in the 7 July 2005 London bombings, but six years on, she was hoping to compete in the Paralympics at sitting volleyball. Martine is an amazing woman. She is without self-pity. She felt lucky, she told me. Lucky? “I survived,” she said; 52 other people hadn’t. She broke down only once when she told me about “Liz” – Elizabeth Kenworthy – an off-duty policewoman who’d stayed with her, who’d applied a makeshift tourniquet to her leg with a belt, who saved her life.

I was touched and moved and inspired by Martine’s story. And I tried to relay that in the article that I wrote about her that appeared in this section. I did my best, but my words were no match for Martine’s words. It’s just not the same as when you hear it yourself. When you witness somebody who’s had the worst kind of luck break down when she remembers the kindness a stranger showed her.

Three weeks later, Martine came to TEDxObserver. And she told her story to everyone. To all of us in the room. And – you see how naff my words are, how they don’t match what I actually felt or what Martine actually said – but I was touched and moved and inspired all over again, only this time in the company of 600 strangers.

We are weird things, us human animals. And we’re only getting weirder. Life is getting weirder. Technology can make us feel more connected, but it can also make us feel further apart. Hearing someone tell their story in their own words is stone-age technology; pre-stone age. But it’s also pretty much the basis of everything that’s happened ever since. That’s how we figured out how to do that stuff with the stones. Somebody told us. So I shall end with another story. Three years ago, my friend Catherine came to TEDxObserver. Two years ago, she bought tickets to the Paralympic sitting volleyball game because she wanted to support Martine. This year, having left her job in finance, she’s setting up a social enterprise to connect isolated older people. Catherine has had an idea of how she can help strangers, and now she’s actually doing it. These stories are not entirely related, but they’re not entirely unrelated either.

 

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