BBC Radio 4 reaches record audience

An unlikely combination of momentous international news stories and a man falling off a roof on The Archers helped propel BBC Radio 4 to its biggest-ever audience of nearly 11 million listeners in the first three months of 2011.

The station had an average weekly audience of 10.83 million listeners between January and March, up 8% on the same period in 2010, according to Rajar audience figures published on Thursday.

Radio 4's Today programme also had a record audience of 7.03 million listeners, 600,000 up on the previous year.

A Radio 4 spokeswoman attributed the rise to the big, breaking news that dominated the year's start, including the Japanese tsunami and the "Arab spring".

The station's long-running soap The Archers, which, during its 60th anniversary in January, killed off Nigel Pargetter, (actor Graham Seed) who tumbled from the roof of Lower Loxley, also got its biggest-ever weekday audience, with a total weekly reach of more than 5 million.

With a record proportion of the UK population tuning into radio each week, four other BBC stations had their highest number of listeners since Rajar's methodology was introduced in 1999. Radio 1 had 11.83 million listeners, while Radio 2 had a weekly audience of 14.54 million.

BBC 6 Music and Radio 7, now rebranded as Radio 4 Extra, also had record highs, as did Radio 1's sister digital station, 1 Xtra.

Tim Davie, director of BBC audio and music, said: "From a BBC perspective, the record results reflect the unique strength of our programme makers and the growing valreaches ue of distinctive radio stations."

The popularity of digital radio grew, up from 24% in the first quarter of 2010, to account for 26.5% of all radio listening.

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