I know why ‘Today’ is losing its listeners
Can it be true that we are falling out of love with the Today programme? That John Humphrys is no longer the first voice we hear in the mornings in bed, Mishal Husain no longer calls the shots at breakfast and Nick Robinson is banned from the shower?
I’m afraid so – although I have not yet defected, and am standing firm, even as my errant husband plays away with Petroc Trelawny on BBC Radio 3.
Talking of playing away, he’s spent this past week communing with Roman remains at Hadrian’s Wall, so I’ve had the dial (packed lunches, school run, supper menus, bedtime routines and general domestic drudgery…) all to myself.
And – I say this more in sorrow than in anger – as I tuned in to Today, I did wonder what was going on in the world while experts engaged in various lengthy ruminations about time travel and Neanderthals rather than, you know, actual news.
Official figures show that Today has shed 65,000 listeners in a year, with its weekly reach for the first quarter falling to just under 7.07 million.
Meanwhile, the audience for Radio 3’s breakfast show rose from 570,000 to 634,000 over the same year-on-year period.
Only one of those is my spouse, so that’s an awful lot of listeners choosing Satie and Wagner over Gary on sport. Or there might be another reason.
Maybe they’re not spurning Gary but are just a bit fed up with pointless outside broadcasts and a preoccupation with transgenderism and the secrets of soil.
Both of these are fine topics for exploration, but possibly not during a three-hour “flagship news and current affairs programme”.
In recent times, the emphasis on Today has apparently shifted towards “revelation and illumination”.
It’s hard to argue against either of these. However, when I’m tucking into my porridge of a morning, I’m more interested in politics than philosophy.