There’s something about starting a new job that makes you feel slightly impotent.

After six years in one job, it’s difficult enough to get “their” and “our” right. It’s hard to remember the similarities between the jobs and the differences. It’s difficult to stop saying “In my old place we did this and it worked really well”.

The little things. Where’s the kitchen? Where are the teabags kept? What the hell’s a CSD? Have I met all the TPMs in HWH? How many are there in BC? WTF are all these TLAs anyway? Can we ban TLAs at the BBC? Oh, that’s a TLA too, isn’t it. OMG. LOL.

The BBC has its own language and its own culture. Most of this is for the good, though it is almost inpenetrable for a newbie. But it’s a very welcoming place. At the end of my fourteenth day, I’ve met a formidable amount of people, visited five BBC buildings, sat in Huw Edwards’ chair in the ten o-clock news studio, seen another three television studios, and made a radio programme on a Dell laptop using Adobe Audition in a meeting room as part of a training exercise.

I’ve also spent the longest time since 1989 without seeing a radio studio. I intend to rectify this shortly.

There are some really clever things happening at the BBC. Clearly, I’ll not be writing about them here until they’re publicly launched; but the challenge all revolves around the amazing amount of unique and diverse content that the BBC creates - and making it easier to find, play and share.

The first evidence of that comes with the iPlayer, which gets a soft launch tomorrow.

The current iteration of the iPlayer is out of my ambit, but I’ve been beta-testing it for a while. (If you’re interested, I was accepted onto the beta test as a general member of the public. BBC Backstage is the place to be to learn about all this stuff.) The conversation about Mac/Linux support - valid though it is - sometimes threatens to get in the way of the fact that iPlayer is a really great product, and I’m thoroughly looking forward to others experiencing it. It’s been a permanent fixture on my home PC for a while. The internal promotional video for it has a lovely woman user called Maureen who proclaims that iPlayer is “her friend” - trite, perhaps, but it communicates that it just works, which was my experience too. (And yes, the team are actively - very actively - working on a version which will work just fine on Mac and Linux. You can trust me on this: I used to work in commercial radio, after all.)

I’ve scored a few personal triumphs, including ‘innovation time’ which I hope I was able to accelerate slightly. I’ve also discovered where the teabags are kept. But it’s hard to make much difference in a few early weeks, and I’m forever cursing myself that I don’t know enough about the business to make many decisions yet. Which is where the impotence comes in. Easy enough to cure on the internet (I get emails offering a cure every few hours) but rather harder in real life. Wish me luck.

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