Wordflood Winslet
By Graham Davies

Poor Kate. For each of the last FOUR years, she went and prepared a faultlessly composed acceptance speech for the Golden Globes. But she had wasted her time.

This year, she thought “stuff the speech, I’m not going to win anyway”, so she did a small amount of fake-smile-training in the bathroom mirror, donned the Yves St Laurent, jumped in the stretch limo and headed off to play her traditional role as glam-also-ran.

At least, that’s the charitable explanation I’d like to provide for Kate’s sphincter-looseningly embarrassing performance the other night.

The fundamental problem for someone making an acceptance speech is that there are only a finite number of variations of the concept of “thank you”. Your audience has heard most of them before. In all likelihood, a significant proportion of them don’t want to hear you saying “thank you”, because they’d prefer to be saying “thank you” themselves, instead.

So. Even if you think you have NO CHANCE WHATSOEVER of winning, prepare a speech in advance. A short one. Otherwise you’ll end up doing a Winslet (winslet, n: a stream of free-form, structure-less, unadulterated emotional gush). This makes you look like an idiot, and will certainly upset Angelina Jolie if the wordflood includes forgetting her name.

If you’re too idle to prepare the whole thing, at least work out the first and last sentence. Don’t be a human storm drain. It doesn’t matter how sexy a star you are, you will still look a pratt.