One of my jobs for three successive managing Directors was to draft various speeches and to produce the annual results presentation to all staff. The latter started off as a straightforward speech followed by a Q&A session.  In the following years slides were added.  Then it became a video production - initially face to camera - but gradually more and more video elements were added - pictures of plants being built, technology being introduced, and people doing various things as well as the usual graphs of costs, sales,market shares, profits, investments etc. A particular favourite where the racy advertisements produced for overseas markets with less stringent advertising standards legislation...

Finbarr introduced further innovations: interviews with popular radio and TV current affairs commentators and talk show hosts like Al Byrne and Pat Kenny which produced some genuinely confrontational questions and answers and debate.  The more confrontational, the more Finbarr liked it.  He was at his best in the heat of debate.  Although we started off doing two takes, the first was invariably the best and was used in full.  The interviewers had been given a tour of the Brewery beforehand where employees and their union reps would delight in feeding them the most awkward questions possible...

Filming these interviews, voiceovers and face-to camera pieces had it's hilarious moments. One of my failings as a writer is a tendency to produce some long and convoluted sentences with a lot of sub clauses.  You can sometimes get away with that on the written page, but it doesn't work as a speech script or a video voice-over.  Finbarr kept stumbling over one particularly convoluted sentences, and refused all attempts by me to re-write it.  He wasn't going to be beaten.  At this stage we had been filming for hours and it was approaching mid-night.  The camera crew were getting increasingly ratty and were casting dirty looks in my direction.  Finally he got it right to a great sigh of relief by all.  He told me afterwards that he, too, could use big words and joined up writing and he wasn't going to let me beat him!

Index of Frank's Diaries