A shout out to lip-readers, unsung heroes of the week

Picture the scene. You’re sitting around with your schoolfriends; teenagers together all dreaming of your wildly exciting future lives. Your mates are saying they want to take business studies so they can be the next Richard Branson, or find the cure for cancer in a hi-tech laboratory, or apprentice in hair and makeup so they can work with pop stars, and then it’s your turn and you say you want to study lip-reading. I’m not being funny, but lip-reading might get a muted response.

Yet lip-readers caused the most recent headline news about our beleaguered prime minister, after she was filmed arguing with the EU president, Jean-Claude Juncker, at a summit in Brussels on Friday, on camera but out of earshot. Specifically, lip-readers revealed that what she had said to him was not: “No, I won’t do the robot again”, but: “What did you call me? You called me nebulous”, making her the Liam Gallagher of cloud-and-mist-based etymological rows. It was the single best moment in Brexit’s two miserable years.

Lip-readers had to study footage of fans shouting alleged racist abuse at footballer Raheem Stirling, we found out last week. In fact, lip-readers from 121 Captions, a company that specialises in forensic lip-reading for the police and Crown Prosecution Service, were enlisted to watch the tirade of insults that were shouted from the stadium seats. The company says that nowadays one of its most important clients are “the media looking for the inside scoop”. And if you watch a lot of football matches on telly, you will have noticed that the players themselves now worry about being caught by lip-readers, hence their new habit of cupping their hands over their mouth when exchanging pleasantries – or otherwise – with their colleagues.

All of which is absolutely glorious, because it means that experts who may previously have been marginalised for being part of the deaf community, or working with the deaf or, indeed, being deaf have had their brilliance recognised. Changing the course of history by being able to see the spoken word instead of hearing it.

Indeed, it’s always brilliant when any undersung talent, on which someone has plugged away for years, has its moment in the sun. Especially when education ministers and other MPs come out with statements about how arts subjects aren’t really worth studying, suggesting there’s no point even doing a degree in English literature, let alone in medieval European history.

Which is particularly odd, if your interest is in cold, hard cash, given that some of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters in the past few years, such as the whole series of Thor movies, have been based on 13th-century Norse texts, with geeky Norse experts hired as film consultants accordingly.

Oh and Neil Gaiman wrote a book called Norse Mythology, which was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic last year, raking in yet more weird, medieval piles of gold. And the novelist Joanne Harris, who also wrote Chocolat (about a single mum who liked sweets – that one got massive too) said she had taught herself Old Norse in order to publish new novels inspired by it.

But, no, best stick to something sensible and mainstream, eh, that’s where the money lies! Something like the law – now that’s always a strong career choice, one that everyone knows could take you all the way to the top. Except for the US president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who took it all the way to the top and is now going to have to live inside the glamorous four walls of a prison cell, thanks to the two women who were paid off, a porn star and a Playboy model, who put him there. If this is the act that leads to the eventual overthrowing of the US government let it never be said that topless modelling doesn’t get us anywhere.

Or waiting at table – because do you know who saved the most lives in Strasbourg last week, after a terrorist gunman took to the streets and murdered four people? Arguably, it wasn’t the police or the intelligence officers, but, rather, the people who ushered terrified pedestrians into the basements of bars and restaurants, thus saving their lives. Yes, the waitresses. So let’s hear it for all the underdog jobs and all the unsung professions, saving lives and toppling governments all around.