Poles apart | 9 August 2018

Much ado is being made of the latest listening figures, which have suggested that the percentage of those aged between 15 and 44 who turn on the radio at least once a week has fallen still further, down now to 13.8 million, or just 21 per cent of the population. Are we losing the listening habit? How worried should BBC Radio be, asked Roger Bolton on Radio 4’s Feedback (produced by Will Yates). He pointed out that while BBC Radio 5 Live is suffering a loss of audience, as is Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, other non-BBC talk-radio stations such as LBC are booming.

Roger Mosey, a former editor of the Today programme, replied that the BBC can’t compete with the opinion-led talk-shows, as hosted by characters like Nigel Farage and broadcast on LBC, and their headline-hungry attitude. At the same time, stations like Radio 1 now have to face off the massive appeal of Love Island on TV and the new ubiquity of Spotify. He wondered whether the BBC is producing enough ‘compelling’ programming. The ‘creative challenge’, he says, is just as significant as the threat posed by streaming and podcasting to linear programming (i.e. the schedules).

One such creative response could be the BBC’s World Service collaboration with Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute. Who would have thought back in the 1970s (when Redford was at the peak of his film career and radio was very much a poor relation of TV) that almost 50 years later Redford would be hosting a radio series? And that it would be dedicated to finding out what neighbourhood means to people in five places across the world, as if in recognition of the power of radio as a communicator. His plummy American voice introduced Wednesday’s documentary We Might As Well Be Finnish in which Kavita Pillay tried to find out the origin of the Finns’ strange expression, ‘We can’t be Swedish.