Moyles and Wogan drive away listeners

Published Thursday 24 July 2008 at 11:55 by Matthew Hemley

BBC radio breakfast show hosts Chris Moyles and Terry Wogan lost a combined total of 872,000 listeners over the three months to the end of June, according to official figures released today.

Wogan, who in the first quarter of 2008 pulled in an audience of 8.1 million, shed 357,000 listeners. Overall, Radio 2 had 12.99 million people tuning, a drop of 4.7% compared with the three months prior, when 13.63 million people listened to the station.

The figures from audience research body Rajar also showed that Radio 1’s audience fell from 11.07 million in the first quarter of the year, to 10.68 million, a drop of 3.5%.

Moyles, who in the first three months of the year had an audience of 7.72 million for his morning show, shed 515,000 listeners, taking the total number of people tuning into his show down to 7.2 million.

Overall, the BBC had a 55.5% share of all listening in the UK, while commercial radio took 42.4%, up from 41.1% in the first quarter.

Elsewhere, Magic’s Neil Fox beat Heart’s Jamie Theakston and Harriet Scott to become the number one commercial breakfast show in London.

Fox’s radio show attracted an average weekly audience of 868,000 listeners between 6am and 9am, giving him an audience share of 5.7% in London.

This put him above Heart’s 5.6% and Capital Radio’s 5.2%.

Listeners to Heart’s breakfast show fell to 844,000 listeners, a drop of 5.5% on last quarter’s Rajars, while Capital’s Johnny Vaughan and Denise Van Outen dropped 6.9% quarter on quarter, pulling in 772,000 for the 6am to 9am period.