Spread out

Eventually, Godric, cascades of initiatives lead to hack fatigue. At the BBC in Birmingham, Tommy Nagra, head of business development, is trying to reassure the second city that things are on the move.

This week, Director of Strategy and Digital James Purnell announced the creation of a Guerilla Group. 

From later this year, a team of storytellers and engineers in Birmingham will begin to work across the BBC with a focus on engaging younger, more diverse audiences, and will be fully up and running from 2015. The group will have the creative freedom to produce experimental new forms of content for programmes and services, using the technology and approaches of the future.

You'll note - no pounds signs or staff numbers offered. Yet presumably they're paying rent on office/studio space at the Fazeley Studios in Digbeth. And the move hardly fills up the already-rented Mailbox.

Explains Tommy, to the Birmingham Post today, "It is an experiment, but there is a three-year commitment. We want it not to feel very BBC as we know it, which is why it is not in the Mailbox, so it is released from the corporate shackles. That is quite exciting and risky, but if we get it right could be powerful and give the Birmingham digital offer a distinctive flavour.”

 “We want the Guerrilla Group to be distinctive and unique. You can get drawn into ‘corporateness’ in the BBC, and we don’t want that to happen.”

Insidious stuff, 'corporateness'. I worry that a variant may have already stretched to Digbeth.