If chatty breakfast shows make you want to throw your porridge at the radio, you’re not alone. Hot on the heels of the BBC’s gender pay gap row comes the news that Chris Evans’s Radio 2 breakfast show has lost nearly half a million listeners. Yes, the man who shaped morning TV and radio in the 90s and early noughties is no longer the big draw he once was.
Granted, retaining 9 million listeners with Evans’s brand of friendly chat and a dash of Jamiroquai is not too shabby, but tastes are changing – it’s not him, it’s us. Podcasts and streaming have shifted listening habits and it’s time for banter-heavy radio shows to move with the times.
Simon Mayo, Mark “Goodiebags” Goodier and Steve Wright were once masters of the breakfast show. You could argue that a time when a character called The Perv banging on Wright’s studio window was classed as broadcasting gold was a much simpler one, but his shenanigans launched the zoo format that lives on today.
Zoe Ball and Sara Cox brought warmth, wit and a feeling that they’d just arrived in a limo from the Met Bar as the breakfast show moved into the new millennium. Then came Chris Moyles, who’d spend the first half hour of his show talking. Mostly about himself. And then talking some more.
Switching off was always an option, but now it’s more likely that people don’t switch on in the first place. Unless you’re stuck in the car for an hour in the morning, you’re no longer a hostage to linear radio. There’s no appointment to listen. If people are craving the spoken word, they can fire up on one of the many podcasts in their queue. And who doesn’t have a Spotify wake-up playlist?
Radio is no longer an alarm clock, having been replaced by smartphones. As a consequence, there’s much to be done before the public even think about turning on the radio. (Checking Instagram, the latest Trump tweets and the morning stream of breaking news are all priorities that have become habit.)
It’s interesting to see that over on Radio 4, listening figures for the Today programme have reached a record high. In the months when the nation has woken up to shocking news events such as the Manchester and London Bridge terror attacks or the Grenfell Tower fire, there’s something comforting about the authority of Sarah Montague, John Humphrys et al. Radio 5 Live and LBC, with their phone-ins offering an opportunity to vent and rant, also fared well.
This isn’t an era where passive listeners are happy to soak up a foghorn of morning talk backed up by a playlist which, aimed at a broad range of tastes, manages to satisfy none. Once news is covered, podcasts scratch the itch for talk in a more targeted way, from TED Talks Daily to My Dad Wrote a Porno. If there’s anyone who’s still relevant in the morning, it’s Radio 1’s Nick Grimshaw, once a glitter-covered new broom who cleared out the station’s older listeners from the back of the cupboard. Now he offers just the right amount of up-all-night anarchy that’s relevant for millennial listeners. You don’t need a focus group to tell that his self-deprecating style and ravey Friday Nixtape resonate with a younger generation – and when he has the delicate task of going on air after a horrific news story or celebrity death, he has a knack of pitching it just right.
As streaming, podcasts and the morning ritual of shouting: “Alexa, play Despacito” at the Echo Dot take up more of potential listeners’ attention, the time has come for the broad and banterous breakfast show to hang up its headphones.
