Braces

Jessi Dean's perfectly-pitched and often hilarious piece on wearing braces was a great success at the House Speech competition last Sunday night. It also works well on the page or screen, so here is the full piece, which starts :-

Ladies and Gentlemen, tonight I’m here to talk to you about a subject that has a huge impact on my life…….Braces! People with braces get such a hard time. You don’t stop to think about it but, when you see the images shown on TV of the typical ‘dork’ they always seem to have braces. Take the show Ugly Betty for instance, which I’m sure you’ve all seen. She’s actually really pretty in real life but, for the show, they’ve obviously thought- ‘hmm..how can we make her Ugly Betty?’ So they stick some braces on her. Well, thanks very much, how’s that supposed to make us feel? And then of course, there’s the amount of ‘clever’ names people have come up with – Braceface (obviously), Chainsaw Chops, Tinsel Teeth, Cageface, Metalmouth, Railway Face…and the list goes on ... continued here