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Media
BBC Trust says R1 still needs to do more to engage younger listeners
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 21 June 2012
The BBC Trust has said that two of the Corporation’s more mainstream services, BBC 1 and Radio 1, are still failing to meet their precise public service remits, despite being generally successful in terms of ratings. The Beeb’s regulator was this week reporting on progress made by the BBC’s various networks in response to previous reviews of their output, and the extent to which they are meeting the service objectives set out by the Trust.
In its new report, the Trust said it wanted to see “BBC1 make further progress in offering distinctive programming in peak-time”, while it reckoned Radio 1 was still appealing to too old a listener, though it did concede work was already underway to address this.
The Trust noted: “Our aim that Radio 1 focuses more clearly on a young target audience so that its median age is within the target age group is still outstanding, although work is under way to address this issue. The median age has remained constant since our review completed in 2009 although, due to a change in RAJAR methodology, it stands at 30, rather than 29, so just outside the target age group of 15 to 29-year-olds”.
In a debate about the role of Radio 1 at The Great Escape last month, panellists, including Xfm founder Sammy Jacob, radio expert Matt Deegan, PR veteran Mark Borkowski and Wall Of Sound chief Mark Jones, also felt that – while successful in many ways – the BBC station wasn’t truly achieving its remit to “entertain and engage a broad range of young listeners with a distinctive mix of contemporary music and speech”. Though they conceded that was partly because that aim was contradictory, in that you arguably can’t engage a mainstream youth audience by providing a distinctive mix of music.
The panellists observed that Radio 1 addressed that problem by focusing on engaging “a broad range of young listeners” in daytime, and fulfilling its “distinctive mix of contemporary music” remit at night-time. Jacob said that he felt the station should try harder to combine some small elements of its nighttime programming into daytime shows, though both he and Deegan conceded that doing so would likely result in a drop in listening figures in the region of 10-20%. Though, given the station’s public service remit, the panel felt that would be a ratings slide worth tolerating.
