The audience for BBC Radio 1’s breakfast show – one of the corporation’s flagship radio programmes – has slumped to the lowest level on record.
The show, which has been presented by Nick Grimshaw for the last five years, attracted 5.3 million listeners per week over the age of 10 in the three months to the end of September.
This is the lowest audience for the breakfast show since Rajar began collecting radio data in 1992 and it is also understood to be the lowest since the breakfast show began in 1967, when it was presented by Tony Blackburn.
Radio 1 celebrated its 50th anniversary last month with the launch of pop-up station called Radio 1 Vintage, which started with a show presented by Grimshaw and Blackburn. Previous presenters of the breakfast show include Noel Edmonds, Simon Mayo, Sara Cox and Chris Moyles.
The BBC is standing by Grimshaw and the breakfast show despite the lacklustre figures, pointing to its large audience online. One BBC source said the breakfast show is “as relevant as it ever was” adding: “It is still the number one breakfast show for young people. But they don’t consume as much traditional radio as they used do.”
The BBC said that Radio 1’s YouTube and Vevo channels now receive an average of 1.6m views a day while its iPlayer channel receives 1.1m views a month.
However, the traditional audience for the breakfast show has fallen from 5.7 million in the same three-month period last year and from around 7 million when Grimshaw started presenting it in 2012.
Radio 1’s overall audience has dipped too. It attracted 10.5 million listeners a week during the three months to the end of September, down from 10.9 million last year, with its share of the audience falling from 6% to 5.9%.
Grimshaw was brought in as presenter to attract younger listeners and shed older listeners, who were more likely to listen to traditional radio. Ben Cooper, the controller of Radio 1, has repeatedly backing the DJ’s performance, saying on Wednesday that Radio 1 remains “the most relevant youth brand in the UK today”.
Other breakfast shows fared better than Grimshaw. Chris Evans, the highest paid BBC star, saw the audience for his Radio 2 show grow from 9.1 million a year ago to 9.4 million, cementing his programme as the most popular in the morning for listeners. The Today programme on Radio 4 recorded an audience of 7.1 million, equivalent to the same period a year ago but down on 7.7 million in the second quarter, a period that included the general election, terrorist attacks in the UK and the Grenfell Tower fire.
On commercial radio, Kiss increased the audience for its breakfast show from 1.8 million a year ago to 2 million among over-15s – making it the biggest national commercial breakfast show – while Nick Ferrari’s breakfast show on LBC reached a record 1.25 million listeners every week.
