DROP THE BIFFO

Hello, gang. Happy Monday.

Firstly: new Bubblegun up now! Typically ridiculous, and worth it for the discussion around Hairdolph Hitler and Sanja's confusion about blowholes.

So! A few things. The biggest one is… we didn’t film over this weekend. Long story short – two of my kids have birthdays this week, so we were meant to be seeing them and doing filming along the way. But for assorted reasons they couldn’t do it, and we had to reschedule.

However… we’d already decided that the video we had planned to launch the new channel with perhaps wasn’t right. We get one chance at this, and we don’t want to risk confusing YouTube unnecessarily. So, we’ve done a slight rejig to ensure sure we launch with the strongest possible statement of intent.

It’s not because we expect the first video to be some viral sensation – we’re new, it’ll be fewer views inevitably at least for a while – but we want to train the algorithm right, and ensure we set out our stall so that everyone who has subscribed knows what to expect, and that everyone who is there wants to be there.

We’ll experiment with slightly different formats occasionally - which may include Britain's Most Boring City - but we want to remain consistent. Anything outside our niche will go on the Digitiser channel, which is already a hodge-podge of everything anyway.

I mean, when you look at Digi now we're folding into one place all our content over the past almost-a-decade … it’s insane. I mean, it’s SO all-over-the-shop, so little wonder that the YouTube algorithm doesn’t know what the hell to do with us.

Digi Level 2 will continue to be re-uploaded once a week, which should take us up to the launch of Drong.

We need to get this new channel right and start out as we mean to go on. We’re hopefully still filming this week, moving one of the videos we were doing in Wales to a new location.

So, thanks for bearing with us as we work to nail it. We'll have some bonus stuff this week, including new Bubblegun Extra, and a Biffo's Brain - which will be on Wednesday for a change. You won't be short-changed.

POD

You would’ve seen we did a new BYAMPOD on Friday, and... I’d really missed it. We'll be doing more.

Not so much the talking about Marillion part, but the being me part, and that has also factored into why we want to get the new channel right. More than that, we got lovely feedback - people had missed us, and we needed to hear that, because.... out of everything we do, BYAMPOD was always just us being us.

When we started BYAMPOD, there were no preconceived notions. Nobody expected anything from me. I wasn’t “Mr Biffo”, but just Paul. As a result, I was far more myself, far more congruent and open, than I’ve ever been on anything I’ve done under the Digi umbrella.

BYAMPOD was frequently funny and silly, but it also gave us space to discuss whatever we wanted. It often got emotional, philosophical… I was so proud of its authenticity and honesty. It felt fully rounded, and a place where I could be me without people ever going "Where's Gannon? Where's Beanus?". People who just wanted to hear what Sanja and I had to say.

When we started doing our bigger documentaries, our intention was to bring some of that BYAMPOD spirit into them, but… we had a big problem. They were appearing on Digitiser, I was calling myself Mr Biffo… and that brought with it an expectation. And I was all too aware of that expectation, and played up to it.

I felt I had to Biffo-it-up, rather than just fully relaxing and being myself. I tried so hard to avoid it, but it would inevitably creep in. There has been a lot of pressure, and it came at a time when I’ve been going through a lot of self-reflection, and feeling I’d been losing sight of who I am.

We want that pressure lifted. We want to be free to make stuff as us and not hide behind Digi’s long shadow, or the character of Mr Biffo. So with that in mind... we’ve changed the name of the new channel - dropping the Biffo.

It’s now Paul And Sanja’s Big Fat Quest. Which we bloody love. YouTube won't let us change the channel name officially until tomorrow, but that's what it'll be: just @PaulAndSanja for the purposes of your bookmarks.

As we’ve said before, it’s going to be the same sort of stuff. We're not dramatically changing what we do. We’ve got four videos properly planned out, a few more in the early stages, and our intention is still to roll them out as quickly as possible - but not rush them.

Again, thanks for your patience this month; it’s probably just as well I got walloped with Covid this month, as we’d have probably filmed by now… and potentially launched the channel in the wrong way. Being ill bought us some vital thinking time.

For both of us it feels like we’ve made absolutely the right call – from putting the old videos back up, from re-launching Digi Level 2, to making Digi the home of Drong’s Challenge… to starting a new channel for the things we’re really passionate about. We just need to separate ourselves from the noise and baggage of Biffo and Digi on there as much as possible. This is big for us, and big for me personally, so thank you for hanging in there while I figured things out.

Onwards!