Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello there. My name is Freddie Rostand and I'm half French and half English.
A bit of a European mixture in fact, or, as some have unkindly put it in the past,
something of a Euro-mongrel.
I've been brought up between the two countries, between the two cultures,
although I have primarily lived here most of my life, in England.
Now let me tell you a bit about where I live. This is Bishop's Waltham.
It's a small village, or town I suppose you could call it, in Hampshire,
on the south coast of England. It's the ancient seat of power from the Bishops of Wessex
from many hundreds of years ago. It's somewhere I love coming home to.
It's really calm and it's really lovely. As you can see, I've got my own edit suite at home as well.
And this is where I do all my work. It's a really nice to place to work, and
it gives me a lot of time and room to think. Now, I've been a journalist for about 20 years.
I worked for BBC News for all that time and, for the past six years, I've been a video journalist.
I've worked all over the world -- a lot of unpleasant places, like Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, and so forth, and
some rather pleasant ones, though I haven't had many of those. Most of the time,
it's pretty unpleasant, to say the least. And you see some extraordinary sights.
Some terrible things, but you also see some wonderful things.
Now, the BBC's way of doing things is very dispassionate. There's no editorializing,
there's no emotion, you cannot use adjectives and, for the BBC, that works very well.
And indeed, it's what their reputation is built on. It's absolutely crucial that one is totally impartial.
The VJM has a slightly different approach. And let's face it -- there is no right way of doing these things.
Stories are just that -- stories. They're things people have seen, people have experienced.
And, as we know, there is no such thing as a fact. It depends entirely on
who's doing the interpreting. Now, with the VJM, what we're going to do is to get right in there
and ask people how things have changed for them. What events have changed their lives,
how have they been changed by them? How have their loved ones, their families been changed by
the events going on around them? And let them, basically, tell their stories.
And that's really crucial. I hope you enjoy my stories
as much as I'm going to enjoy telling them. Thanks very much for listening.