[Andre Mina]

Hi everyone

I am a Swiss national currently living in Tokyo and I have recently tuned in to your podcast for the first time. Since then I think I went through almost all of them. I have not jet subscribed to the magazine but I am certainly planning on doing so soon. Truly great subjects, great questions and always very educated guests so congratulations on that. Two things I would like to remark on the podcast:

1. Sound quality: I know this has been mentioned in the forum before. I usually listen to your podcast on my way to work and eventhough Japanese metro cars are not particularly noisy it is often hard for me to understand the podcast because the sound quality seems sometimes very low, as if the Skype connection was particularly bad on the day the interview was done. I am sure there must be ways to improve this.

2. Subjects: I love the fact that you try to focus on events that are usually overlooked by most historians and are almost certainly unknown to non-historians (including me). Given the fact that this is a BBC program, naturally most subject are in one way or another related to British History. But since I am sure that many of your listeners are living outside the UK it would be very interesting to have more insights to events which do not directly link to the UK sphere (as was done in the podcast on the battle of marathon or the one on the history of china for example rather than - no offense - wetlands in the medieval period). Even though I am certainly biased by my own interests it would be great to have more sujects on Asia since the understanding of Asian history seems key to dealing with its ever growing importance - how about the British presence in India or Hong Kong or the Boxer Rebellion... and as a sort of exotic episode you could maybe explain how the English invented tourism in Switzerland.

Thank you and keep up the good work!
Andre

[Rob Attar]

Hi Andre, thanks a lot for your feedback. It's good to know we have a dedicated listener out in Tokyo!

Sound quality is something that we're working really hard to improve and hopefully you and other listeners will have noticed that it has been better over the past few weeks. Most of our interviews are now conducted via ISDN or face-to-face, which will mean the quality should be enhanced. Do let us know, though, if you find any sections less clear in future.

I'm glad that you enjoy the subject matter. I take your point about the British focus of the podcast, which will always be there to some extent as we're a British publication. On the other hand we do indeed have very many overseas listeners and we'll do our best to ensure there is non-British content on there as well. We do have a few things planned, such as the ancient Olympics, Egypt and the development of the Americas and I'm sure there will be other topics in the pipeline as well.