I’ve been listening to Radio 1 since I was about 12 years old. It shaped my taste in music, it forged my love of radio, and its voices, in-jokes and jingles – just as much as its playlists – have soundtracked decades of rushed mornings and slow afternoons and big nights.
Tuning in now, to the Greg James breakfast show, gives me a nostalgic connection to the past – when Radio 1 was cool, anarchic, and unmissable, a way to be part of something bigger, connected to a scene that felt like another universe from everyday, suburban tedium. I know how formative radio was for me as a teenager and in my twenties, and how long this was a cultural force to be reckoned with for the generations that came before. So it’s not easy for me to say this. But I think it’s got to give up chasing the young.
Yesterday the station announced a big shake-up of its schedule, resulting in six presenters leaving – including Melvin Odoom, Rickie Haywood-Williams and Dean McCullough. Among those added to the line-up are TikTok stars GK Barry and Charley Marlowe, which has prompted the now familiar outcry about influencers being appointed to jobs that ought to go to experienced, skilled DJs who have risen the ranks and earned it.
My feeling on that is that while it’s not a good look, some successful “content creators” really are good broadcasters whose popularity depends on a genuine connection with their fans, of precisely the same kind that great radio DJs build. So I can understand why stations might give shows to figures like Barry, with big opinions and big followings and most importantly, big personalities, in a bid to draw their followers to listen or cash in on their popularity. I also think it will never work.
Radio 1’s problem runs too deep to be fixed by any desperate, panicked “refresh”. I think about it every time I listen to Greg James, and wonder how long he will last before he gets a better offer and what in the world they’ll do without him. They must be terrified. Because it is his show, which will turn eight in August, and his show alone that retains the galvanised community and authority of Radio 1’s heyday. He is their last-surviving big hitter – see his invitation to Taylor Swift’s wedding for confirmation of that – and when he goes, Radio 1’s struggle for relevance will be graver than ever.
It’s not Radio 1’s fault, and it’s not the only victim. We all know what it’s up against. Radio competes with social media and short-form video for attention. It competes with podcasts for listeners. It competes with algorithms and streamers for new music. And BBC radio specifically competes with better-funded commercial rivals for big-name presenting talent.
None of these other mediums, in my view, have a hope at creating the live frisson, intimacy, or companionship of the community around a good radio programme. But the only people who know how important that is are those, like me, who already have it ingrained and would mourn its absence. It’s not ingrained in young people who have grown up around diffuse media, to be consumed on demand, where something communal and mainstream is bland compared to all the podcasts and YouTube videos that cater to the very nichest of interests and tastes.
Radio 1 is hit hardest by the threats to the industry because part of its purpose is to ingrain the relationship with the medium: to engage with the culture of an audience that is more fragmented than ever, bring people together, and keep them listening.
The trio of Melvin Odoom, Charlie Hedges and Rickie Haywood-Williams is being split up (Photo: Leigh Keily/BBC)As it contends with budget cuts and white papers and the ever-divisive licence fee, the BBC talks a lot about meeting audiences “where they are”. That means prioritising streaming before linear TV, it means podcasts before live broadcasts, it means a bombardment with short-form video on social media and it can mean putting “personalities” before products and programmes. It probably rested on its legacy for too long before accepting the reality of the existential threats that risk destroying it, but meeting audiences “where they are” is its best chance of survival.
But does that really work with Radio 1? Radio 1 is supposed to be the “place” its audience wants to be. A conversation you don’t want to miss out on, the first play of a song the world is waiting to hear, an interview with the most exciting and most famous people in the world, an exclusive live performance of a cover an artist has never played before. It’s supposed to be a club, a friendship group, full of in-jokes and anecdotes and shared memories – but one that everybody is allowed to join.
Ten, 20 years ago, when listeners didn’t have so many distractions nor so much choice, Radio 1 and its presenters felt like a team, who would take you along with them to the Brit Awards, to their Christmas party, to Glastonbury. Only Greg James’s show continues this same spirit.
Shouldn’t that community be what it aims to build? Young people are so disengaged with radio and the BBC that the measures to appeal to them are growing desperate. And thanks to tech and streamers, Radio 1 can never again be at music’s cutting edge. So rather than trying and failing to relate to an audience that is less and less interested, and ending up with a muddled voice and a confused identity, perhaps it should abandon the burdensome “youth” label altogether.
Perhaps it should focus instead on the millennials who still remember Radio 1 as a place of rowdy unpredictability, of possibility, of reliable, funny, smart presenters and teams that don’t take themselves too seriously and who you imagine you might be friends with, rather than big attention-seeking ones you can’t relate to playing tinny TikTok music.
There’s a gap in the market, isn’t there? All this panic about “youth” neglects the number of millennials left in limbo by the BBC. I suspect that a significant proportion of James’s 4.23m weekly listeners do not lie in Radio 1’s 15-29 “youth” bracket at all but are people between 30 and 40 who grew up with the station and haven’t fully kicked the habit.
Radio 1 in the era of Annie Nightingale used to be a cultural force to be reckoned with (Photo: Peter Stone/Mirrorpix/Getty)His programme, once safe compared to others on the roster, is the only one on there that hasn’t quite aged us out: other shows presented by millennials, like Matt and Molly at lunchtime and Going Home with Vick, Katie and Jamie, feel geared to the more juvenile listener. And yet there doesn’t seem a clear place for us to go next. Even with its rejigs to incorporate more Noughties and 90s music, Radio 2 still feels about seven years too old to be relatable for youngish professionals, and 6 Music has better songs but is a lot less fun. Would it really be such a betrayal for Radio 1 to park the youngest demographic as a lost cause for now and try instead to recapture the millennials left adrift?
Easier said than done, of course: part of the crisis Radio 1 faces is that Greg James does not have any clones, nor any obvious successors. Its problems are all exacerbated because radio’s diminishing impact is cutting off the pipeline of rising stars. People who would once have earned their stripes in local radio or in the graveyard slots either give up because the opportunities aren’t there, or make their own content, start podcasts, or go on reality TV, and if they’re successful then the BBC can’t afford to appoint them anyway.
But if Radio 1 is to survive, it would do better to spend time and resources appealing to the listeners it lost, not the ones too young to care. James is proof that there is still an audience for mature, human programmes with a silly streak, that take risks, that stop underestimating listeners’ intelligence when it comes to conversations and more importantly stop underestimating their age when it comes to the music choices.
More programmes like this are Radio 1’s best chance of sincerely meeting listeners in every sense of “where they are”– and of restoring the prestige and community powerful enough that it might once again capture the elusive, all-important “youth”.
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