Owen Gibson
The Guardian
Friday May 10, 2002
The migration of JRR Tolkien’s fantasy classic The Lord of the Rings to the big screen proved a hit with cinema goers, but now the story has won further acclaim in the Radio 4 schedules of the BBC.
Hobbits, Orcs and the mellifluous voice of the actor Sir Ian Holm drew almost a million listeners a week during the series’ 13-week run, giving the station a magical burst on Saturday afternoons. As many as 900,000 people tuned in to the radio show, first broadcast more than 20 years ago.
The success of the adaptation pushed the station to a total weekly audience of almost 10 million, a rise of 900,000 on the previous year’s figures, according to the latest Rajar results. “It was a bold decision to use the series again, despite the hype over the film. It demanded a lot of commitment from the listener, and old dramatisations often do not stand the test of time. We’re delighted with the response,” said a Radio 4 spokeswoman.
Drawing on the hype surrounding the film version of the Tolkien classic, which came out last autumn, the radio series began on January 5 and starred Sir Ian as reluctant hero Frodo Baggins. The actor went on to play the older Bilbo in the film.
The huge audience was unprecedented for a literary adaptation, and helped Radio 4 retain its position as most listened to station in London. While current affairs shows such as Today regularly attract more than six million listeners, dramas are not usually big audience pullers.
The Radio 4 listening figures cement a golden year for BBC radio, as Radio 2 gained the Sony prize for station of the year. However, the listening fortunes have not extended throughout the BBC. Radio 1, home to presenters such as Sara Cox, managed to shed 250,000 listeners in the past quarter. The station reaches 8.4% of radio listeners, compared with 9.1% a year ago.
Radio 1 is just about holding its head over the 10 million mark; on average, 10.54 million listeners tune in each week. However, the station still reaches more than half the nation’s 15- to 24-year-olds, its target audience.
Virgin Radio, which slumped in the ratings after it was bought by SMG for £225m in 2000, has shown signs of recovery. Its national audience share bounced back slightly to 1.3%, with just under 2.5 million listeners tuning in weekly. Daryl Denham, the 32-year-old plucked from obscurity to host the breakfast show, managed to increase national audiences by 8%.
In London however, where the Virgin station is broadcast on FM rather than AM, it is still roundly beaten by most of the competition.
Classic FM enjoyed its fourth consecutive rise in listeners, with the managing director, Roger Lewis, suggesting the GWR-owned station now had more than 500,000 15- to 24-year-old listeners. Classic FM is now the second most popular commercial station in London behind Capital Radio.
But the first audience figures for Teamtalk 252 make grim reading. Its new owners had refashioned the pop station Atlantic 252 as Teamtalk – but where Atlantic once reached more than four million listeners, Teamtalk gets just 428,000 listeners a week. Its rival, Talksport, increased its overall weekly audience slightly to 2.47 million.
