Decline and fall of the Today programme?

Radio 4 has lost over a million listeners in the last year, a loss of 11.4% of its total audience. Most dramatic of all has been the fall in the audience for Radio 4’s flagship programme, Today. In the first quarter of 2023 it registered only 5.76 million listeners, its smallest audience in almost 25 years.

One obvious explanation for this decline could be that we are following one of the most dramatic news periods for years. In the last few years Prime Ministers and Chancellors have gone and gone with astonishing rapidity. Since Brexit we have had four Prime Ministers and five Chancellors in seven years.

It has indeed been an extraordinary few years for political drama, at home and abroad. We had the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014, Brexit in 2016, the rise and fall of Corbyn between 2015 and 2019, the Grenfell Fire in 2017, Boris Johnson’s landslide victory in 2019, the Covid pandemic starting in 2020, the Trump elections in 2016 and 2020. Then came Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine in 2022-23, which triggered a huge rise in energy prices, the deaths of Prince Philip and the Queen, the ongoing drama of Harry and Meghan and the fall of Nicola Sturgeon.

Huge events, big personalities. By comparison, except for Ukraine, the last few months have seen less drama. The period of Sunak and Biden has seen a quiet interregnum, at least until the next elections on both sides of the Atlantic, and perhaps this is reflected in the falling audience figures. Suddenly, there is less big news and listeners are switching off.

There is an argument that the big news audience in the last few years and the non-stop dramatic cycle of news was not a coincidence. Could it be that BBC News programmes, including Today, had an investment in this non-stop drama? Of course, they were not responsible for the extraordinary instability since Brexit. But did they stoke the fires of UKIP and the mayhem leading up to and then following Brexit, with endless interviews with the most excitable Remainers and Brexiteers, many of them minor figures whose names it’s hard to even recall now? Tory backbenchers were constantly on BBC News programmes, just as later on, royal pundits were frequently invited on to go on about Harry and Meghan. By contrast, the Today programme was astonishingly slow to investigate what was happening in Scotland before the fall of the house of Sturgeon.

You could not fault Today for not giving enough time or attention to Covid or for not inviting enough medical scientists and epidemiologists onto the programme to discuss possible cures, the seriousness of the pandemic and the competence (or otherwise) of the government and its scientific advisers. But just a short time after the peak of Covid, do we really know whether Sweden got it right or wrong, whether more Britons died of Covid than French, Germans or Italians and if so why, or who was most vulnerable to the disease? Do you know how many European countries lost more people per million of their population than Britain? None or 14? (The correct answer according to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ is 14.) How confident would we be that when the next pandemic breaks out, which surely it will, we would be sure who would be the most vulnerable people in society?

And how much was our response to Covid responsible for the problems in healthcare, from GPs surgeries to hospital waiting lists, today? I am struck by one curious piece of anecdotal evidence. I don’t know a single person who died of Covid or who was hospitalised with Covid. But I know an astonishing number of people who have died or been seriously ill with cancer or heart disease in the last few years.  Just as BBC News got Brexit and the 2019 election wrong, have they also missed a big story about serious illnesses not related to Covid? Could we be talking about two very different groups of people? Many of those who died of Covid were the elderly, those with pre-existing conditions, the poor, ethnic minorities, people on the front line, exposed to the germs of others. Those I know who have died or been seriously ill in their 50s-70s don’t fit any of these categories. 

There was a strong sense after Brexit and the 2019 election, brilliantly described by Roger Mosey in his recent book, 20 Things That Would Make the News Better, that BBC News programmes got many of the big stories wrong. Did this lead to a growing disillusionment among Today listeners? It wasn’t just that after all the excitement that surrounded all these huge new stories over the past few years, things had got a bit, well, dull. Perhaps there was also a sense that despite all the excitement and drama, Today hadn’t actually got the big stories right.

Could its young producers be too biased against the Tories, too keen to go to war against Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Dominic Raab? Or are they perhaps too pessimistic, going on and on and on about energy prices, food inflation, immigration statistics, trade union strikes, crises in the NHS, and not providing enough useful comparisons with equivalent figures in Europe or any actual analysis?

How satisfied are listeners with presenters on the Today programme? This week there was an item on the dramatic increase in children who don’t turn up for school. There were two interviewees. One runs six schools in Kent and spoke very powerfully about the “chaotic” homes of most of these children. It was a word he kept using. Then they interviewed Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner for England, a regular guest on Today, who didn’t say anything at all about these children’s “chaotic” backgrounds, or how schools or the Government could afford to solve these very real problems. In fact, she had nothing useful to say at all.

At one point, Dame de Souza suggested better school meals could attract children back to school. If we were presenting the programme, you or I might have suggested we could hear school heads, education ministers and parents around the country shouting at their radio. Where’s the money for improving school dinners or, indeed, sorting out “chaotic” families? The presenter, of course, said no such thing. According to Sally Weale in The Guardian, in early 2022 de Souza announced that her office would research and explore how to get children either persistently absent from school, or out of school altogether, back into classrooms. Her work on Attendance and finding children and encouraging and supporting them back into education is ongoing.

Since RAJAR produced its statistics of the falling number of listeners to the Today programme, how has Today responded? Their programme editors and producers have not addressed any of the above issues but they have hugely increased their coverage of British trees. It is not clear how this, the endless procession of interviewees from charities and NGOs, or the persistent political bias on the programme, will help turn the tide. Is the BBC content simply to watch the decline and fall of its flagship news analysis programme on radio?

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