A Laugh in the Spotlight: Some crazy moments as an MC

There’s a certain art to being an MC—balancing professionalism with personality, steering the programme while keeping the mood light. Over the years, I’ve found myself in all sorts of hilarious situations at the podium, but a few experiences stand out as my all-time favourites.

I’ve done standard one-day indoor conferences as MC – with audiences ranging from 50 to over 1,000 delegates. One of the bigger ones was for a global consulting firm bringing all their consultants from around the region together for a one-day celebration of the year that was. I prefer not to have a rigidly prepared script but to go with the “feel” of the client and event. For this one, we had the whole day carefully scripted – and the script included introductions, awards, accolades, facilitation of panel discussions, and so on. I also happened to know quite a few of the attendees. Now there is a marvellous piece of technology called an “autocue” (or teleprompter) that displays the speaker / MC’s entire script in such a way that no one else can see it. And with a skilful operator, you create a partnership better than the best marriage!

A great operator meant that I could divert from the script on occasion to bring my own on-the-spot humour and insights, and we could continue seamlessly with the script. Having a few drinks and snacks after the full day’s event, many of the folks I knew at the event (who are very smart, graduated professionals) mentioned how impressed they were that I had memorised the whole script and their colleagues’ achievements and awards, as well as the speakers’ biographies. I smiled, took another sip of my drink and thanked them – because a magician never reveals their secrets.

Over the years, I’ve also double-teamed with a client CEO as James Bond – in full tuxedo attire…. And water pistols. And I’ve opened a Marketing Awards event as Mr Bean’s cousin, Jelly Bean. I’ve also been a “host” for a Black Friday event for a company specialising in construction-heavy machinery! Can you imagine me in a hard hat?

And then there was the 4-day conference I emceed and created a “reality TV show” as part of the whole event. I supplied four groups with a video camera every day and had a 30-minute daily episode (today it would be called a vlog, I suppose) for each evening’s “council”. This was in the days before digital, so everything was on tape and had to be edited digitally and then rendered. And due to the complexity, I found myself having to launch into a team sing-along whilst waiting for the first evening’s episode – I’m not a singer and can’t sing, and yet there we were waxing some tune about chirpy, chirpy, tweet, tweet.

I am thankful to a client for recently using me as the MC at their sales conference in the Drakensberg last week – this photo is from that occasion.

Need someone to control the evening festivities or the awards function? Get in touch with Lauren at lauren@ridgelineza.com.