Audience churn for Radio 2 but it’s early days for breakfast show

The latest audience listening figures from industry body Rajar released today show a drop for BBC Radio 2, but it remains the UK’s most listened to station.

Although the station’s breakfast show lost more than 360,000 listeners during the first three months of this year, Scott Mills didn’t take over hosting it until the end of the first month.

New breakfast shows usually cause a station’s listening to churn until it beds in, and a trend begins to emerge.

Radio 2 still has the most popular breakfast show in the UK, with an audience of 6.45 million, a drop of 5% on the previous quarter, but a far cry from the Wogan and Evans eras which were around eight to nine million.

Vernon Kay’s mid-morning show is still the UK’s most popular programme with 6.73 million weekly listeners. This compares to when Ken Bruce presented the same show with 8.2 million listeners.

The station’s weekly audience fell by 539,000 to 13.1 million listeners compared to the final quarter of 2024.

Elsewhere, Radio 1 was down by 144,000 listeners, KISS has seen an increase of 407,000 while Magic was up 228,000 weekly listeners.

Magic’s breakfast show with Gok Wan and Harriet Scott was up slightly to 862,000, but down on the 1.2 million listeners when Ronan Keating co-hosted the show.

Heart Breakfast with Jamie Theakston and Amanda Holden is still the most popular commercial breakfast show in the UK. The show saw an increase of 250,000, taking it to 4.3 million weekly listeners.