Fusion View on the BBC

Fusion View is being featured on the BBC Radio 5 programme Pods & Blogs on Monday 25 June night (actually 02am on Tuesday 26 June) when it will go out over the airwaves to around half a million AM listeners and half a million FM listeners. The programme will also be available online for ONE WEEK on their website but unfortunately not as a podcast so if you’d like to catch it, you need to go to the site and listen during this coming week. (The Fusion View piece is at around 30 mins into the show, after the news and sport.)

I met Chris Vallance, the presenter, for lunch a few weeks ago at Hayes Galleria by London Bridge and we had a wide-ranging discussion about blogs, podcasts, the Chinese in the UK, cross-cultural issues, globalisation, Malaysian bloggers and much more. It was great to get his perspective as a blogs and pods watcher as well as sharing mine with him as a blogger and podcaster.

He only pulled out his recording equipment after lunch and we wandered around trying to find a quiet corner for him to record the interview. We ended up standing in an alleyway, not far from a white van where a couple of builders were having their sarnies and thermos of tea. Having had a good old chat over lunch, the moment Chris thrust his fancy microphone towards me, I went completely blank and started stammering and dithering - we had to start again several times before I hit my stride and could even say anything sensible about who I was and what Fusion View is all about! I’ve interviewed a number of people on my podcasts and I have to say, it’s utterly different being on the other end of the mike - I have even greater respect now for my Fusion View interviewees in that they never had to do any re-takes and just started chatting with confidence and panache.

The interview was only 10 minutes and we ended up focusing on my novels rather more than on Fusion View. After we finished, I realised I hadn’t had a chance to talk about the various themes of my blog such as:

# Fusion Stories - personal stories of people who live cross-cultural lives eg a Welsh-Iranian student, a South African living in Germany, a Caucasian-American who writes fiction in Mandarin.
# How switching between my “two voices“, speaking “proper” English and heavily accented Malaysian-English, affects my personality and identity
# Podcast interviews with Lucy Luck, a literary agent and Terry Bailey, a lecturer in screenwriting
# Curious Legacies - Recipes and other legacies from people who have influenced my life eg my first boyfriend’s recipe for Hairdryer Duck and my grandmother’s recipe for Soy Sauce Chicken.
# Legacy Blogging: stories from my family eg a recording from 1976 of my late grandfather telling the story of the “first ancestor” from China and my father’s Memories of Malaya during the Japanese occupation.

Chris also wanted me to explain to the world the equipment I use to do my podcasts. I had described it to him over lunch and he thought it was worthwhile for other potential podcasters to know that the equipment didn’t have to be too fancy or expensive - although I have to say, I was rather impressed by his equipment: the professional big flash drive; the robust noise-cancelling microphone and all those buttons. In the end, they didn’t use that bit of the interview in the piece they broadcast but anyway, here’s a picture of my home-made podcasting gear.

That’s a wooden kitchen roll holder and slotted into it is an old leather mobile phone case. The digital recorder sits snugly in the leather case. Ideally, I sit at a table with my interviewee with the equipment sort of in the middle on the table between us. I point the recorder at them when they speak. When it’s my turn to speak, I swivel it towards me by turning the base gently, ask my question and then swivel it back to them. The advantage is that my arm doesn’t get tired holding the recorder up and it also sits a sufficient distance away from our mouths to avoid explosive “PPPs” and “TTTs”. I’m tickled that Chris, the professional BBC journalist, has given it his seal of approval!

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The variety and fun of this blog would not have been possible without all the people who contributed to it through writing guest pieces, agreeing to be interviewed, adding comments or emailing me in response to posts - and also all those offline who sparked ideas for posts through our conversations over coffee and dinner. So thanks to everyone who has been part of the Fusion View community is some way or other!