The BBC needs to make savings. Where better to start than by axing the popular archival radio station Radio 4Extra? Well, I could make a few suggestions… Although the channel’s content will, it is claimed, continue to be available on BBC iPlayer, the announcement this week means the end of so called ‛linear’ broadcasting, as in a scheduled service that can be received on digital radio.
I’ve been listening to Radio 4Extra since the days it was known as BBC7. I got my first DAB radio specifically to be able to receive the channel, which was launched during the BBC’s transition from analogue to digital radio broadcasting around the turn of the century. In 2012, the station was rebranded as Radio 4Extra, losing some of its original content (a children’s schedule had been running on weekend afternoons), and making room for more recently broadcast material from Radio 4. But the mainstay of its output remained primarily archival material, and over the years the station has unearthed rare and valuable programmes that otherwise would have had no other outlet.
Radio 4Extra has always been a big part of my own personal ‛radio mix’ which at one time even extended as far as Radio One. Not any more. Nor, indeed, do I still listen to Radio 2, since the channel’s controllers started tinkering with the demographic, easing out presenters and programmes that were perceived as appealing to an older audience. During the Covid pandemic, I baled out of Radio 4 – the daily news was simply too depressing – and began listening almost exclusively to Radio 4Extra. You might say I was in denial, but why not? Who wouldn’t rather live in the sound world of the Light Programme and the Home Service, rather than the endlessly depressing downward spiral of contemporary news broadcasts? That, of course, is by no means a justification for retaining Radio 4Extra as a ‛linear’ station: but I’m sure there are many people, living on their own, who have it on in the background, as well as listening to specific programmes. Not everyone wants the mix of contemporary drama, comedy and current affairs that makes up the daily schedule on Radio 4.
Radio 4Extra is unique amongst British radio stations. Music, news and sport are more than adequately covered by other BBC national and local stations, and there is of course, a huge choice of commercial broadcasters. But nowhere else on the UK’s radio network will you find a mix of curated, archival drama, spoken word and comedy. The fact is that all such content on British radio has historically come from the BBC: commercial stations have never bothered with original drama or comedy. Where else is one to find them?
On television, it’s a different story. Whilst the BBC seems to care little for the deeper levels of its archive, there are still occasional welcome exhumations on BBC4 – like the repeats of Call My Bluff that have popped up over the past couple of years, and occasional seasons of major drama serials and plays. Older content – meaning just about anything made in black and white – has been surfacing on Talking Pictures TV, a digital TV station that knows its audience and programmes its schedules accordingly.
If Radio 4Extra is to stop broadcasting, what we need in its place is a station that will pick up those older archival shows – many of them painstakingly recovered and restored by an interest group known as the Radio Circle. I’ve written elsewhere about the online station Serenade Radio that styles itself after the old Light Programme, with a schedule comprising of easy listening and light pop material, including items of archival BBC content like Sing Something Simple and Music While You Work. Is this a potential model for a future ‛linear’ BBC archival service? Would the BBC make its radio archive available to interested parties? Another thought: why not sacrifice some of Radio 4’s broadcast hours make room for a regular archive slot? Or even the recently introduced and mostly ignored Radio 3 Unwind? Isn’t a good book or play as valid a way of ‛unwinding’ than ambient music and birdsong?
Realistically, all linear radio broadcasting will one day come to an end, replaced by online, streaming-based services. Rather than tuning in, listeners will have to pick the shows they want to hear from a menu. But this is clearly not the same thing at all as simply turning on and listening ‛at random’. In this way, I’ve discovered programmes I’d never have heard otherwise. Only a few weeks back, I went down to our local Waterstones to pick up a copy of J.L. Carr’s marvellously melancholic novel ‛A Month in the Country’, which I’d heard as a superb reading on 4Extra. I’d never heard of Carr before: he turns out to have been a fascinating, unique character, who ran his own small press for many years. But I wouldn’t know him at all if it weren’t for 4Extra. I caught the broadcast by chance, owing to my habit of leaving the radio on in the kitchen, tuned permanently to the station. This element of serendipity is what we’ll miss when the channel is reduced to an online shadow of its former self. In the same way, I recently stumbled across a broadcast of John Betjeman in conversation with the cartoonist, stage designer and architectural historian Osbert Lancaster. They were talking about conservatories. It was superbly old bufferish, recondite, and exactly the kind of thing one would never come across anywhere else.
But the real question the BBC needs to answer is why Radio 4Extra should be the first head on the radio chopping block? It’s reaching 1.4 million listeners a week, and out-performing other stations like the three utterly superfluous extra iterations of Radio One: Radio 1Xtra, Radio 1 Dance and Radio 1 Anthems. These stations, two of which don’t even figure in RAJAR’s ‛hours per head’ figures, should have been first in the firing line. Music is more than adequately represented on both the BBC and commercial stations. There are, at time of writing, two incarnations of BBC 6 Music, which itself was threatened with the axe some years ago, but won a reprieve when listeners complained. Radio 3 has only recently launched its ‛mindful’ alter ego ‛Radio 3 Unwind’, which is under-performing Radio 4 Extra by a considerable margin and clocking up zero hours per head in RAJAR’s latest listening figures. As for Radio 5, it too is available in four flavours, with no fewer than three ‛sports extra’ channels. Sports fans are well catered for elsewhere across the mainstream media: surely the BBC can let one or two of them go?
Sadly, I’m afraid that the decision to close Radio 4Extra as a broadcast service is yet another example of the BBC’s ageism. The channel’s archival content makes it a favourite with older listeners, especially those who’ve been driven away from other channels like Radio 2 and even Radio 4 in the BBC’s relentless drive to be contemporary and appeal to a younger audience. This flies in the face of statistics showing that UK radio stations see higher engagement from older listeners. We oldies may be listening to the BBC, but the BBC isn’t listening to us.
This is nothing new: the Corporation has been chasing the ‛youth’ market since the big shakeup of the mid 60s that gave us ‛wonderful’ Radio One, and ushered in an era of celebrity DJs commanding eye-watering salaries. Realistically, this kind of thing has to stop if the BBC really wants to save money. I’d be interested to know exactly how much money will be saved by downgrading Radio 4Extra to an online only service? Of all the BBC’s radio networks, it must be one of the cheapest to maintain: all the programmes are readily available, there’s next to nothing new being produced, and the only areas of expenditure will be research, restoration, rights and presenters’ salaries. I’d really like to know how these figures compare to any of the other ‛extra’ radio stations.
In justifying service closures like this, BBC executives regularly remind us that although 94% of adults use BBC services per month, less than 80% of households actually pay the annual licence fee. It is this loss of revenue that has to be made good through cuts to staff, programmes and services. But as a ‛BBC insider’ told the Guardian this week, “there is a very credible threat that there will be an increase in people choosing to opt out of the licence fee because it no longer does them a service.”
One thing is clear: the cuts announced this week are only the beginning. I confidently expect to see the demise of BBC4 within the year – the channel’s content has been pared back drastically in recent years, with no new documentaries being commissioned, and judging from the endless trails one sees on air, the channel is desperately trying to get its audience used to the idea of watching their content on iPlayer.
So what of the future? The BBC claims that some of 4Extra’s content will still be accessible through iPlayer, which is small comfort for older listeners who may not be online at all. And for those of us who can listen online, what will be available? Exactly the same programmes that are available now: Hancock, The Goon Show, Steptoe and Son and a raft of other classic comedies have been available long term on iPlayer for a good few years. I doubt we’ll see any of the classic drama serials, plays, whodunnits and vintage panel shows that currently feature in the daily programme listings unless the iPlayer offering is drastically overhauled. But at the end of the day, this kind of ‛self service’ radio is not what 4Extra listeners want, nor what the BBC’s peerless audio archive deserves.
There’s still a chance that this can all be nipped in the bud. There’s a petition online to save the station, which can be found here: https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-radio-4-extra-1