Rajar Q3 2021: Breakfast markets

BBC Radio 2’s Zoe Ball remains the queen of the radio breakfast show, after recording 7.2m weekly listeners between April and September 2021, according to Rajar.

However, despite not being able to compare the performance of Ball’s show with the same period from last year, we do know that in Q1 of 2020, she again came out on top in the Rajar rankings but with a whopping 8.1m listeners during the three month period.

Over this extended survey period, a year and a half later, it suggests that the Radio 2 Breakfast Show continues to lose around a million listeners a year – a trend that first started when Ball took over from Chris Evans at the beginning of 2019. 

Over at the Virgin Network, Evans’ share of the Breakfast Show market has now dipped below one million listeners to 985,000 after a stronger performance in the first quarter of 2020. 

BBC Radio 4’s Today programme meanwhile is pulling in 6.5m listeners between 6am and 9am, while Breakfast with Greg James recorded 4.2m listeners for Radio 1. 

Heart Breakfast with Jamie Theakston and Amanda Holden is still the biggest commercial radio show in the UK, with a recorded 4m listeners for the extended Q3 Rajar period. 

Roman Kemp on Capital has a long way to go if he’s going to catch Theakston and Holden after recording 2.8m weekly listeners. 

To see who is dominating the London breakfast show market and to read more findings from Rajar’s Q3 2021 National Stations Breakfast Weekly Reach, log-in to Mediatel Connected to view the tables below.