Brilliant humorous speeches

Last night was contest night and it did not disappoint!

The judges must have had an incredibly difficult job deciding who would win our humorous speech contest and table topics contest, to compete on behalf of our club at area level.

But they managed it and it was the Ryan Parke Show.  Huge well done to Ryan – not only did he enter both the contests – he won them both!

Ryan wins the double

It’s hard to know whether it was his hilarious tale of when he devoured a table decoration along with his steak, while out for dinner, that had us laughing the most.  Or if it was his recollection of the time when he broke into an Austrian family’s mountain home, and fought off their dog.  Either way, we are sure he will do well when he represents in the area contest.

Our humorous speech contestants

Every one of the contestants did us proud.  From Anthony Boboe telling us of the floating Rasta-man’s head outside a London club, and Shayan’s 10k struggle that resulted in an injured ‘muscle’, to Ajeet’s comedic performance on the subject of HTML – How To Meet Ladies, Ajeet stylee.  Well done to everyone for stepping up and taking part.

Table topic contestants

There was no requirement for our table topics contestants to be humorous, but they all had us chuckling after being given the statement “My perfect day is…” to wax lyrical on.  All the participants did themselves proud: Andrew, Aparna, Corinne, Anthony Brennan and Werner.

We had three guests join us for the night, who were kind enough to get involved and help us moderate the vote counting and share the timekeeping role.  They seemed to have a great time and we hope to see them back at our next meeting on 11th October.

The whole evening was a huge success and it wouldn’t have been so without the excellent leadership from our contest chair Richard.  He showed us all how it should be done, working closely with chief judge, Judy, and our stand-in Sergeant-at-Arms Colin.

Lets all give Ryan our full support by attending the area contest in Luton on 7th October, 1pm:

University of Bedfordshire Student Union in Luton Room G004
Vicarage Parking Lot
Vicarage Street
Luton LU1 3HZ
Richard with Ajeet
Richard with Anthony
Richard and Aparna
Richard and Corinne

It’s conference time!

The Inaugural Division H Conference is taking place on 14th October from 10am-5:30pm,
The Stafford Cripps Centre, Cranfield University, MK43 0AL

Programme, information and booking details are on the conference website division-h.mktoastmasters.co.uk/

These are the three top reasons for attending conferences:

1) The workshops A lot of thought has gone into the workshops where we strive to cover better speaking skills, skills for speaking success in the real world, leadership excellence, and thriving clubs. It is rare to assemble this quality and choice of presenters outside of District conferences and rarer still to have it at affordable prices in a convenient location.

2) Networking and catching up Toastmasters from 16 clubs and our friends will be assembling with ample refreshments and breakout space to network. You could easily make new friends and connect with excellent speakers in your field and thus find mentors or proteges.

3) The thrilling contests
Get to see six humorous speech and six Table Topics contestants battle it out for places in the finals at the District conference in Sheffield (3-5 November). The standards are going up exponentially with each round as contestants hone their speeches to perfection. I was blown away by the standards at the first Division conference I visited. I still remember the drunk squaddie’s night out

£30 for the day including lunch and refreshments or attend for just the morning or afternoon for £10. Contestants please contact us for special rates.

Preparing for our upcoming contest

Who wants to deliver a humorous speech?  That was the question of the evening at the West Herts Speaker Club meeting on 13th September, posed by club member Richard, who’s admirably volunteered himself to be contest chair at our upcoming humorous speech contest on the 27th September.  We Toastmasters love a contest and the humorous speech is a particularly enjoyable one, by its very nature, it’s one that guarantees much laughter.

Round the world, Toastmasters clubs are holding humorous speech contests, competing at division area, regional, national and international levels. Well done to everyone who put themselves forward, but especially to Ryan and Andrew, who have entered both the prepared speech contest as well as the impromptu speaking contest.  We think these two have a bit of rivalry going on…

Anthony is toastmaster for the night

It was business as usual otherwise for our club meeting, brilliantly led by our toastmaster of the night Anthony Boboe.  We had three guests join us for the evening, keen to know what West Herts Speaker Club is all about.  One has indicated she’s really keen to sign up to be a member, another loved how more relaxed we were compared with her former club in Hungary, and the other didn’t reappear after the short break – hey you can’t win them all!

Patrick wins best table topics

We also welcomed back Patrick, who was visiting us from Toastmasters in Luton.  He smashed his impromptu question, posed by our topics master Paul M, and won the coveted best table topics speaker award for the night.

Ryan wins best speaker

Our prepared speeches were delivered firstly by Aga, who was keen to dispel the myth that we should be eating five portions of fruit and veg a day; then Ryan who shared his top tips on how to influence people and not be held back by worries; finishing with Andrew, whose excellent speech on leadership blew everyone’s mind, not least because he over-ran the maximum allocated speech time by four minutes – you can’t be doing that during the contest next week Andrew!  All were inspired speeches, but it was Ryan that won the coveted Best Speaker award this week.

Richard & Paul tie for best evaluator

When it came to evaluations, the quality of the evaluators was so high that we simply couldn’t pick one winner.  Well done to Richard and Paul G, who shared the prize for the night.

Now try as we might to be a very serious club that observes all the rules of Toastmasters international, we do have our moments and Wednesday night was no exception.  Shout out to Spencer – our grammarian, who forgot he was supposed to provide a ‘word of the day’, to Jill – our timekeeper who repeatedly forgot to write down the times (she can’t do that during a contest) and to Phil – our general evaluator who hilariously failed to notice that he’d been fed the word ‘procreate’ as one of the 4 P’s Paul G had used in his evaluation of Aga’s speech.  Funny times.

We look forward to our humorous speech contest on the 27th and encourage as many guests as possible to attend.