Weekend Telegraph

For many of us, the annual company dinner is about to be served. The posh frocks are coming out of mothballs and ample physiques are squeezing into dinner jackets. After the food will come the speech - invariably a 20-30 minute affair made by someone who commands a huge fee but is probably a name only in their own household.

Christopher Middleton tracked down three unknown - yet highly successful - veterans of the after-dinner circuit.

GRAHAM DAVIES

Age 32

Other Job Criminal Barrister at the Temple

Speaking Event Thresher Area Sales Mangers Dinner

Venue Hinckley Island Hotel, near Leicester

Menu Pearls of honeydew melon, supreme of chicken Riesling; Paris-Brest (choux pastry filled with fresh fruit)

Tickets Free (staff do)

Speaking Tips Get as much inside information as possible on the people you'll be speaking to. Don't drink alcohol before you go on

It's a quarter past eleven at night when Graham Davies finally gets up to speak.

The evening is already well advanced; drinking began at 7:30pm and has shown no signs of slowing down since. There's been an 18-man band of Highland Pipers, there's been a noisy, spoof royal awards ceremony at which all have had prizes and, given half a chance, the 130-strong audience would probably be quite happy just to retire to the bar for the rest of the night.

For much of the evening, Graham has been concentrating hard. He's had a long day in court (Inner London Crown) and now he's having a long night in Leicestershire. Seated at the top table, he's made hardly any conversation, has paid no attention to his melon balls and chicken breast and has spent half the time tinkering with his speech and the other half frenziedly gathering tit-bits of gossip about characters within the company. Everyone else may be at play but Graham is still very much at work.

It's six years now since he arrived on the after-dinner circuit. An ex-president of the Cambridge union, since 1988 he's been doing three or four after-dinner speeches a week.

Which is why, at the crucial moment when the evening hangs poised between bed and bar, he has the experience to prod the MC in the ribs and insist on being introduced at once.

"Mr Graham Davies", announces the MC, reading from the script Graham has given him. "He combines the comic genius of Ian Paisley with the sheer intellectual depth of the Sunday Sport".

And off Graham goes, cleaving through the faint, inevitable ripple of "Graham who?" (after all they had Bob Monkhouse at the Christmas bash) with a series of one-liners mainly at the expense of Thresher's senior management.

He describes the firm's operations director as " a man with the personal presence of Lord Lucan" and goes on to congratulate one of the portlier salesmen "on having won his long fight against anorexia".

The jokes hit the mark. Before long the room is howling with laughter and in receptive mood for Graham's more general cheeky-cheery comedy, which runs along the lines of " I used to manage the five Nolan Sisters - these days I can only manage two".

There are plenty of jokes about his own profession: "As a barrister, I want to make it clear that I've got principles and that if you don't like them, I've got others". And finally there's a Great Unanswered Questions tour de force ("can anyone please till me why did kamikaze pilots bother to wear helmets?")

At the end of his 45-minute talk, both he and the audience are breathless and exhilarated, and he receives probably the ultimate accolade when the operations director who's been the butt of most of the in-house jokes, rounds off the formal proceedings with the words: "Thank you Graham, you bastard".

In the bar afterwards, the speaker is pleased but relieved. "It could have gone either way", he says, downing his first alcoholic drink of the night (it's 12:30 am). "I knew that I had to get in quick and keep everything short or I'd lose them.

"The vital thing with a tight-knit group like this is to establish yourself immediately as an insider, to make references that only they will understand, so that right from your first few sentences they feel you're one of them, that you belong".

Which, of course, he doesn't. As is the fate with all speakers, after an initial bout of back-slapping and congratulation, Graham is largely ignored in the round of after-supper socialising at the end of the evening. It doesn't matter though. He got paid - and tomorrow he'll be belonging somewhere else.