How do you like your eggs in the morning? According to the latest radio figures, in silence.
Well, alright, that’s not quite true. The kitchen counters of the UK have not exactly fallen into a deathly hush – rather, the number of people boiling kettles and brushing their teeth to a soundtrack of 1970s summer hits, football analysis and MPs furiously evading anything that smells even vaguely like a question has slightly decreased. According to the industry body, Rajar, BBC Radios 1, 2 and 4, as well as commercial stations such as Virgin, Kiss and Capital, have all seen a reduction in the number of listeners to their breakfast shows. Gone are the heady days of the 1990s, when I was such an avid morning radio listener that I would wear a portable radio in a bum bag around my thick little waist, tuned to Radio 1, while picking out my PE kit and trying to make an unsmelly sandwich.
So what has happened? Overall radio listening figures seem to have increased a little from July to September this year, but the number of breakfast show listeners has definitely dropped off. Are we all just lying in? Wasting the day? Not me, guv.
It would be easy to regard these lacklustre breakfast listening figures as yet another example of our increasingly atomised, individualist society. According to the Office for National Statistics, between 11 and 14 June, 37.7% of people in Britain worked exclusively from home. That’s millions of people sitting at a laptop balanced on an ironing board, talking to their colleagues – if at all – through a haze of digital technology, mere minutes after rolling out of bed. Without a commute to gear up for, or a traditional workplace to greet, a large proportion of the British public no longer need to be roused from their beds by the audio equivalent of a Teasmade – whistling, boiling, splattering political discourse stewed with a tannic mix of pop music and callers on the line. The orange juice ad cliche of a family blinking around a table together, reading the paper and listening to the radio before heading out for another busy day at an institution, is even less likely to be true now.
Although we may not all be able to choose our working hours, we can choose what we want to listen to and when. According to the Rajar findings, although 89% of the UK population listens to radio at least once a week, about 74% of people surveyed listen to it digitally. We have swapped the wireless for going wireless, downloading the choicest cuts of radio to our devices to listen to at a time and pace that suits us. In the same way we are adjusting to watching television on streaming services rather than sitting around a family box, or walking to the sofa rather than jumping on a crowded 253 bus, maybe we are starting to ease ourselves away from collective experiences. Instead of automatically turning on the radio, we’ve decided that we’d rather listen to a 21-year-old episode of Desert Island Discs in which Clarissa Dickson Wright describes getting skewered by an underwired bra while dancing to Boney M (it’s an absolute classic).
As someone who has worked from home for nearly a decade, I have long been spared the need to rouse myself with morning phone-ins, acrylic pop music or conniving politicians. Instead, I have been howled conscious at 4am by a breastfeeding baby or have snuck down to a darkened desk before dawn to try to do my work before the tumult of cleaning teeth, packing rucksacks and laundry overwhelms me. By the time the rest of the world was chewing through Thought for the Day, a buzz-in quiz or yet another rendition of Berlin’s Take My Breath Away (Magic FM – I’m looking at you), I’ve often been awake for four hours and am already thinking about lunch. Was this wha sociologist Arlie Hochschild meant by the Second Shift? Trying to get a whole day’s worth of paid employment out of the way before the sun comes up? Perhaps. And if so, I am hardly the only woman who has been crunched this way by the pandemic.
There is also the small fact that listening to the news can sometimes feel like the audio equivalent of being woken by an angle grinder to the bedstead. It takes a strong stomach and a stout heart to handle the sound of Boris Johnson or Priti Patel before you’ve even had a sniff of tea and toast. The climate emergency, the spiralling coronavirus figures, a tsunami of cronyism and corruption; it’s all quite a lot to handle as you wash your armpits or pack your child’s carrot batons.
Thankfully, there are still pockets of almost unfathomable joy and provincial oddity in morning radio. Between you and me, I have for years harboured a secret hope that someone will propose to me via Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs. Imagine it, a little shout out, just between Mike and the Mechanics, one of Steve’s non-ecdotes about the spare bedroom and a funny news story about a dog launderette. I can think of no better way to enter a life of matrimonial bliss. Maybe one day. If I’m up in time.
Nell Frizzell is the author of The Panic Years
