Yesterday morning I got an emergency text from my Producer, Paulette, to tell me that James Gibbs wasn’t going to be able to make it to the studio. He had to rush off to London. I’m guessing that was something to do with getting his visa for Nigeria so that he could take part in the Wole Soyinka 80th birthday celebrations.

Fortunately I was well prepared. I had two pre-recorded interviews in the can, and had only been planning to run one. So I just ran both, and all was well.

First up was a chat with a new SF writer from Trinidad, Rhonda Garcia. Her book, Lex Talionis, is available from the usual outlets. As mentioned on the show, there is a interview with her on Tobias Buckell’s blog. There is also a longer version of the radio interview that I will post to Salon Futura in due course. And I’ll try to find the time to write a review. Rhonda was a lot of fun to interview. I hope you enjoy listening to her as much as I did.

The other interview was the one with Leah Moore that I bagged before we went on our Liverpool pub crawl last Saturday. On the radio we cover following a famous father in his career, and doing mom journalism. The full version of the interview also discusses the new Electricomics venture and again will appear on Salon Futura.

Both interviews have a bit of background noise — Rhonda’s because we were on the phone between the UK and Trinidad, and Leah’s because we were sat in the foyer of the Liverpool Hilton. We also had an annoying technical glitch as the beginning of Rhonda’s interview. When you record from Skype you have the option to reserve one channel for yourself and the other for the person at the other end. It gives an impression of stereo. When we played Rhonda’s interview we discovered that one channel on the board wasn’t working, so only one voice was coming through. Thankfully Seth, my genius engineer, was able to quickly switch into mono for the broadcast and save the day. Live radio, it is terrifying at times.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

For the second hour I handed over to Paulette for a couple of race-related issues. First up the head teacher at the center of the racism complaints we discussed two weeks ago has chosen to pursue other career options. Secondly, as you may remember from my discussion of Bristol & the slave trade with Olivette Otele, there is some controversy in the city over the honors given to Edward Colston, who is feted as a philanthropist bit who made most of his money from the slave trade. Colston Hall, Bristol’s premier music venue, is now considering changing it’s name. In the studio to discuss these issues was civil rights campaigner, Paul Stephenson, the only non-white man ever to receive the Freedom of Bristol.

You can listen to the second hour here.

While I was at the studios I had a brief chat with Lady Nia who, together with our station manager, DJ Styles, hosts the highlights show on BBC Radio Bristol & Radio Somerset. She was telling Paulette that their last show had featured a clip from our show where Paulette was talking about her trip back to Jamaica. I’m briefly in that clip introducing Paulette. Much to my surprise and delight, Nia mentioned that they had also used my interview with Karen Lord from Ã…con. Unfortunately the BBC only keeps those shows on Listen Again for a week, but I’ll keep an eye on them from now on to see if they use anything else I’ve done.