Ratings by day, credibility by night remains the right strategy
Radio 1’s daytime continuity is vital to the health of the station overall: this shouldn’t change.
The old BBC Radio cliché is well known, and has held true over the years “ratings by day, credibility by night”. The argument is at core what BBC Radio should or shouldn’t be about, should it indulge in populist mass broadcasting or should it only serve those who have no provision of their niche tastes provided by commercial alternatives. Radio 1 has, over the decades, trod this line relatively well.
Radio 1’s core PSB justification is that it serves young people. You couldn’t make that case if it was targeting 25–35 year olds; it is its’ focus on 16–24 year olds that makes the public service argument valid: the likes of Capital may target in a broad sense, a younger demographic, but only the BBC can provide a full service like Radio 1 tailor made for a demographic without much money in the bank and of much less interest to broadcast advertisers compared to say, young families a little further up the age range with a bit more cash to burn and more products required. The PSB justification has of course shifted over the years: the original case was simply that with the closure of private radio the BBC should provide pop music: this case would be meaningless today considering you can hear hit music all over the shop and streaming services exist, hence Radio 1 being a youth network at core, not simply a hit music station.
This fine balance is dealt with pretty well these days, with daytimes keeping continuity. If you want to build up a mass audience that you can steer towards the more niche and specialist content during off peak hours, your daytime station sound has to have stationarity to it, it needs to have the same sound through the day. Now, this isn’t Capital or Heart, and we all know during daytime Radio 1 is anything but a jukebox, but what it does do is maintain a steady flow of mainstream hit music with new stuff mixed in, distinctive from Capital, but mainstream enough that it creates a familiar sound listeners know they can stay tuned in to through the day without any sort of dramatic gear change or alienating muse-like specialist content. Radio 1 during the day aims to entertain.
This has gone off the boil in both directions at various points. In the early 1990s it became clear that A: Radio 1 was failing to target young audiences, hence seriously tainting its PSB credentials and causing existential questioning about the very purpose of the station itself, and B: (while this was overstated by the Conservative government at the time) it was pretty much going for being a mass entertainment station, the BBC One of music radio, something it wasn’t meant to do and something too mainstream for the BBC to be willing to justify in the political climate of the time (it is a matter of opinion if the BBC was wrong about that or not).
And alternately there have been spells where Radio 1 has pushed the envelope and been creative and brilliant and shredded audiences by the bucket load in the process. There is a limit to how far you can push the envelope during the daytimes without dropping so much your existence is once again called into question. In the early Matthew Bannister era lots of intellectual speech was featured during daytime, and the overwhelming majority of the playlist was non-chart based. This had a purpose in terms of shifting public perception of the station, but if you go too far in that direction (as you did) you shed audiences and you slip too far from the mainstream to entertain your target audience; young people aren’t all trendy, the majority of us aren’t, as those projects discovered.
In short, the purpose of Radio 1 isn’t to be trendy, the purpose of Radio 1 is to be mass appeal, but mass appeal to 16–24s. And in that mix it is key they keep stationarity during daytime, all so they can do more news, wider playlist, specialist shows at night, live festival coverage, and all the other things Radio 1 does so well. In this era of the station they seem to be hitting that target pretty well: one of the switches over the last few years since Grimmy left Breakfast (and even a little before that) has been a move away from celebrities for the sake of celebrities, and much more focus on the personalities and critically, on the listeners. This feels much more fitting as Radio 1 begins to target Gen Z, a generation much less hyper focused on celebrity gossip and a little more reflective and contemplative about life, who need more than ever an outlet that is not only theirs, but is away from the noise of the online world and which curates what you need to know with familiar voices and loved music.
You could argue, that even though 16–24s are listening to radio a bit less, and critically for a lot less time, Radio 1 has a unique story to tell about its role in the BBC family in 2022 that is even stronger than in say, 2002. There’s something Radio 1 can do which nothing else can, and right now it’s doing it very well. One of the very interesting things they’ve done is moving Future Sounds to 6PM: and in the process the playlist of that show feels a lot closer to daytime Radio 1 than it once did; essentially acting as a bridge between harder specialist content and the very mainstream drive show before it: I actually think this is a very good idea and so far it seems to have worked well. The only word of warning would be not to creep specialist content any earlier, they’re switching specialist about as early as you can go, and even if there is pressure to make daytimes yet more distinctive, I would say it’s distinctive enough and a further shift would risk going into the “not mainstream enough” ditch, not something I can see the very sensible team running Radio 1 at the moment contemplating doing.
