More numbers

The Sunday Times replacement for Gillian Reynolds, Patricia Nicol, may have to wait for elevation to the Radio Academy. She's ridden roughshod through the request from RAJAR, the official radio audience measurers not to compare figures from their latest quarterly report with previous numbers compiled under a different system. And Patricia has uncovered figures not normally shared with the public under either system. 

"The UK’s three biggest morning shows — The Zoe Ball Breakfast show on Radio 2 (7.2 million listeners), Radio 4’s Today programme (6.5m) and Radio 1’s Breakfast with Greg James (4.3m) — have together shed about 1.8m listeners. But breakfast radio is, forgive me, far from toast. More intriguing is the shift in peak weekday listening from 8am pre-pandemic, to the far more leisurely 10am. And audiences are now sticking around after lunch.

Some will gripe that there are no exact comparative pre-pandemic figures, because RAJAR has tweaked its methodology. But the patterns are clear and the winners are claiming victory. On LBC, seasoned liberal combatant James O’Brien (10am-1pm) celebrated a record 1.3m weekly listeners. Over on Times Radio, which greeted inaugural RAJAR listener figures of 637,000 with joy, irrepressible elevenses star Matt Chorley sounded like he might pop his own cork as he raised a glass of champagne to his 250,000 weekly listeners. On Twitter, Virgin Radio’s Eddy Temple-Morris declared himself “honoured and humbled” by new mid-morning record listening figures. Virgin’s star breakfast presenter, Chris Evans, has seen his audience dip below 1m.

The growth of mid-morning listening is impressive. Woman’s Hour (3.2m listeners) is up by about 100,000 listeners. Ken Bruce on Radio 2, Britain’s most popular radio show since 2019, was up 400,000 to 8.65m listeners. On Smooth Radio, Kate Garraway has a record 2.5m listeners. Over on Classic FM, Alexander Armstrong attracts 2.4m weekly listeners. And the breakfast shows that go later, like the fun Heart Breakfast with Jamie Theakston and Amanda Holden, from 6.30-10am (now UK commercial radio’s biggest breakfast show with 4.1m listeners), Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 6 Music, from 7.30-10.30am (with 1.35m listeners), or Chris Moyles on Radio X, from 6.30-10am (with 1.1m listeners) are all posting record numbers."