Interviewed on The Colbert Report

The Colbert Report – Piers Gibbon on Cannibalism from Piers Gibbon on Vimeo. This is an extract from The Colbert Report. Stephen is interviewing Piers about the film he presented/hosted for National Geographic Channel – Eating With Cannibals   This photo and Piers’ hair courtesy of Shine Holistic

Voiceover and Interviews via Source Connect

Piers Gibbon’s hackney-based home studio is now equipped with SourceConnect (as well as the usual ISDN Prima LT)… it’s another way for Piers to deliver broadcast quality audio without getting properly dressed in the morning!

TV Presenter: Headshrinkers of the Amazon

Headshrinkers of the Amazon is out on National Geographic Channel worldwide. Directed by Osca Humphreys and presented Piers Gibbon, it is all about the Shuar people of Ecuador. The story is kickstarted by the discovery of some footage shot by an explorer in the 1960’s – which looks like it shows the only known footage of a genuine headshrinking ceremony, with a real human head being shrunk to the size of an orange. On the way to find out what is really going on in the footage Piers meet the President of the Shuar, a battalion of jungle fighting specialists, a Catholic missionary who campaigns against headshrinking by converting the Shuar to Christianity, oh and a member of a lynch mob who is happy to talk about the day they dragged someone off into the jungle and “turned him into powder”… Thanks to everyone at Diverse TV and of course the Shuar for all their hospitality.

Hosting Tania Glyde’s book evening for “Cleaning Up”

Tania Glyde wrote “Cleaning Up” about her descent into drink and drugs..and how she got herself back on the straight and narrow You can buy it – or find out more – by clicking here To celebrate the launch into paperback she had a public session at The Big Green Bookshop The evening starts with me reading out some extracts from Tania’s book..you can hear me flicking through the pages until the audience shout “stop”. After the readings I then spent a very happy 40 minutes taking questions from the audience for Tania to answer.  

Yoko Ono has never eaten dogmeat

As a presenter and voiceover I have broadcast some odd things over the years. RESONANCE FM – APOLOGY TO YOKO ONO I’d like to interrupt our normal broadcast to read out a formal apology to Yoko Ono for an appalling and offensive story that we broadcast last week about her. We’ll be broadcasting this apology throughout the day. On 29 May 2007 at 9pm performance artist Mark McGowan appeared on the “Make Your Own Damn Music” show. For reasons best known to himself, Mark brought what he claimed was a cooked Corgi dog into the studio and ate some of it on air. Mark claimed that Yoko Ono was in the studio with him and that Yoko also tasted some of the dog meat. When the press contacted us, we subsequently confirmed that the story about Yoko was true. I’m embarrassed to announce that the story was completely untrue. Yoko was not in the studio, and in fact was not even in London, as she was in Russia, attending the opening of her show in the Moscow Biennale. She doesn’t know Mark, didn’t eat any dog meat, and has never eaten any dog meat. What we broadcast was a gratuitous, offensive lie. On behalf of Resonance FM I want to say that we are very sincerely sorry for the offence and distress that we’ve caused to Yoko. She is a renowned supporter of the arts and music and we owed her better than to lie about her in this way.

PowerPoint Kills

I love to hate PowerPoint…when I teach Public Speaking and host conferences people often discuss how many wordy slides to include in a forty five minute speech. The answer of course is “none – and why are you speaking for that long?”” and now the excellent Edward Tufte has argued persuasively that reliance on PowerPoint was a factor in the Space Shuttle disaster thanks to dotpolka for the photo

Innovation Leadership

I am giving a talk on the 30th November at this event in London It has been put together by the inspiring Professor Bettina von Stamm. She has taken as the starting point the award winning article (and now book) “Why should anyone be led by you?” by Professors Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones. Rod has been helping put it together. We’ll be working on what exactly makes a good leader: Reveal your weaknesses, Become a sensor, Practice tough empathy and my favourite – Dare to be different It’s getting booked rapidly as they are keeping the numbers low to allow more participation from delegates.