Just over a year ago, I made one of the most important speeches of my life: I was Best Man at my friend Nick’s wedding.

As a way of marking the anniversary, I thought that I’d try and remember how I managed to avoid disaster, enjoy the experience, and even get a few plaudits for the way I negotiated this particular rite of passage.  I’m not trying to compete with those exhaustive websites that exist solely for helping Best Men (and I’ll never be able to match Matt Lucas in Gavin & Stacey when it comes to Best Man advice), but in a way it’s a reminder to myself how well a presentation can go with the right preparation, material, and audience.

So, in time-honoured fashion, I’ve compiled a list of Ten Top Tips:

1. What’s the Approach?  The first thing I did was make a clear decision on what kind of a speech it was going to be, and having seen a few times at other weddings how well-chosen visuals can bring a speech to life, I decided to go the A/V route, with laptop, projector and pictures.  By using photos, you give the audience something to latch on to, which not only takes the pressure off you as speaker (they aren’t spending the whole time looking at you), but also provides visual punchlines to what you say, and if the people at the back have any troubles hearing, they still have something to entertain and amuse them.
2. Do Wide Research – I think a mistake a lot of Best Men commit is to make the speech only about their own experience of the Groom.  The danger of doing that is that it’s too narrow a view, too particular, and you end up with in-jokes and references aimed only at ‘the lads’ – which is fine if you’re in on the joke, but the rest of the guests are going to feel sidelined and switch off and that makes your job harder overall, cos you’re supposed to entertain and speak to everyone.  It’s easy to get a laugh off your best mates, but there’s no better feeling than bringing down the whole house, so you’ve got to write with that in mind!  I took the view that the day of Nick’s wedding was an opportunity to reflect on who and what he is, and do it in the context of his entire life to date… So, I set about talking to the key people in his life, starting with his family, who of course were also my main source of embarrassing and cute photos from which to pick.  I then talked to his best friends from school days, ex-girlfriends, colleagues past & present (he’s a teacher), and even former pupils I either know or could contact through Facebook.  The result of all this research?  I had more material for stories and slides than I could possibly use; but that also meant I could choose what to use according to where I decided to focus – far better to have too much material than too little!
3. Create a Story – for me the story was created through a simple device, of looking at the different sides of his character, that anyone would recognise in him, and illustrating them with anecdotes and pictures.  Using his own song titles, I covered his music-making, his pretty-boy looks (!), his love of talking (!), his fondness for lists, the importance of his sister to him, his cycling exploits, his illustrious career as a brilliant teacher, and finally his love for his bride.  Most of it was jokes at his expense, but I made sure I shot it through with affection – it’s good for the occasion to mix in a bit of ‘aahhh’ with the ‘ha ha’
4. Think About Timing – In the UK we allow more time for the speeches than any other country I know of, which is great cos it means there’s an opportunity to get into your groove; but given that, the greatest crime you can commit as Best Man is to be boring and let it drag.  So before you start writing, give yourself a rough time-scale to work to: I think I allowed myself 20 minutes, which seems long, but if you have a ‘narrative’ it passes very quickly, believe me!
5. First Draft in Long Form – I began by writing down my basic ‘chapters’, and a load of ‘anecdotes’ all referred to by titles/keywords, a bit like you would an essay plan.  I also had a few dozen photos that were all funny or sweet or illustrative in some way, that I had scanned.  These were my building blocks, and I wrote up a first draft based on them, with everything in it that I thought had merit.  I wrote in long form, as if I were going to read the speech out from paper.  Then I timed myself reading it, and of course it was about twice as long as I’d allocated myself.
6. Edit Mercilessly – Then I started to cut the text, leaving out stories and even entire sections that I thought were less good than my best stuff, and trying to remember my maxim about playing to the whole audience and not just the in-crowd.  You have to be completely merciless with yourself, and not worry about abandoning good laughs… You have to remind yourself that what the guests don’t hear they won’t miss, and concentrate on keeping the speech flowing from one thing to another.  Also, for me, I had to assess which photos would work best with which stories to deliver the punchlines for maximum laughs.  As I cut, I also distilled the long-form text into shorter and shorter notes on record cards for me to hold in my hand on the night: these are essential as a safety net, but by the time I actually spoke, I don’t think I referred to them at all, because the slides on the screen had become all the prompts I needed.
7. Practise.  A Lot – Don’t get me wrong, I was really really nervous about doing the Best Man thing.  I’d never done it before, and I don’t think Nick has plans to get married more than the once, so I basically saw it as a one-take chance to do the job (and my best friend) justice.  I set up my projector and screen in an upstairs bedroom in the days before the event, and paced up and down going through the speech over and over and over and over again, using a remote control to click through my photos, and trying to get to the stage where I could sound relaxed and spontaneous even as I kept the pace up and stuck to my timings.
8. Don’t Try and Recite It Verbatim – It really struck me as I rehearsed that the key was not to try and remember it all word-for-word: if you do that the whole thing ‘runs on a rail’, and the slightest nervous deviation can throw you completely with disastrous consequences. (The most memorable example of this I’ve ever seen was Graham Whitby of Baby Dream Machine (3:17 onwards) in the first ever episode of Dragon’s Den, when he kept fluffing his lines, but was so dependent on a memorised script that he couldn’t do anything but start over and over.  At the same time, speaking from memory can detach you from what you are saying, so you don’t come over like you mean it in the same way you do if you are merely remembering a general structure, around which things can be more spontaneous.  Finally, when reciting from memory, some people (myself included) tend to lose engagement with the audience, because the act of remembering the phrases and exact wordings brings with it an involuntary wandering of the eyes up and to the side to ‘the memory spot’.  So, definitely best not to memorise the speech, but rather to practise it sufficiently that you know the raw material back to front, and can enjoy the telling as if it were new.
9. Make Time To Get The Technical Stuff Right – The wedding reception took place in a barn down near Winchester, so I arranged to get down there a couple of weeks ahead to check that it would be possible to rig up a projector and screen, and that things would work in terms of sight lines etc.  Then, the day before, I got myself in there and did a trial run of hooking everything up and getting a picture successfully.  All of which meant that when it was time for the real thing, I was able to concentrate on the message not the medium!
10. Don’t Get Drunk – Finally, and maybe it seems obvious, but most of us have seen one or two Best Men in our time who allowed themselves too much Dutch courage during what can seem like a loooong nervous wait to ‘perform’, and as a result they really shamed themselves.  I definitely needed a couple of glasses of champagne to settle the nerves, and to be sociable of course, but I kept it to a minimum and was sober and settled when at last the time came.  You get the pay-off after, cos it’s a hell of a feeling when you’re done, and you can really let yourself go: a drink never tasted so sweet!!