BBC blame football for Cox decline

The latest RAJAR radio ratings deliver some bad news for BBC Radio 1 whose Sara Cox breakfast show has shed in the region of a million listeners in the last year. The DJ currently attracts a weekly average of 6.9 million listeners - down 900,000 on the peak she reached in the summer of 2001. But BBC bosses have defended their flagship show, arguing last summer’s figures were exceptionally high and the current stats are around what they would expect – especially as breakfast time World Cup matches meant less people were listening to music radio in the mornings during June this year. This would seem to be backed up by sister station BBC Radio Five Live’s figures whose world cup coverage saw their audience rise by almost a million in the last year to 6.7 million a week. Cox was overtaken by BBC Radio 2's Terry Wogan as the UK's most popular breakfast DJ earlier this year, and it’s a lead he maintains with an average of 7.4 million over-15-year-olds tuning into Wogan on weekday mornings. And the unstoppable BBC Radio 2 continued the success story of recent years with a record audience of more than 13 million. Some stations felt the football had helped them - Classic FM admited their average audience rise of 360,000 had a lot to do with listeners trying to escape the World Cup. "At a time when sports stations such as Radio Five Live have picked up listeners with their World Cup coverage, those who are not so interested in football have come to Classic FM for something a little different," the stations managing editor Darren Henley commented.