Nick Grimshaw’s BBC Radio 1 breakfast show is to be cut back to four days a week as a new generation of presenters takes over in the biggest shake-up in the show’s 51-year history.
Grimshaw, who has presented the weekday breakfast show since 2012, is to stop hosting on Fridays from June with the programme being rebranded as Radio 1’s Weekend Breakfast as part of a move to keep it relevant with a youth audience.
The move marks the first time that Radio 1 has used two different presenting lineups for the breakfast show since it was first broadcast in 1967.
In 2012, a 27-year old Grimshaw was brought in to replace Chris Moyles, then aged 38, in a move aimed at keeping Radio 1 relevant with young people who were increasingly turning to digital services such as YouTube for music entertainment.
Grimshaw is just weeks away from becoming the breakfast show’s second-longest serving presenter. Moyles holds the record at eight years and 253 days, with Tony Blackburn, its first presenter, second on five years and 244 days.
Grimshaw has had a tough time while attempting to grow the audience of one of the corporation’s flagship radio programmes. In October, it was revealed that the show’s audience had slumped to its lowest level, attracting 5.3 million listeners a week over the age of 10 in the quarter to the end of September.
Grimshaw, who inherited an audience of about 7 million listeners when he took over from Moyles, has since staged a minor rally. In the last quarter of 2017 he pushed his listener numbers up to 6.16 million, the show’s biggest weekly reach in two years.
Ben Cooper, the controller of BBC Radio 1, 1Xtra and the Asian Network, indicated that the Friday change was specifically aimed at providing a fresh offering for younger listeners.
“The weekend will start here at Radio 1 on a Friday morning giving our young audience that feelgood factor a day early,” he said. “It’s our job at Radio 1 to reinvent the way young people listen to the radio, to disrupt traditional thinking and to look for new ways in which to grow audiences.”
The Friday breakfast slot, 6.30am to 10am, will be taken over by Dev and Alice Levine. The 10am to 1pm slot will be a greatest hits show fronted by Maya Jama, 23, who currently has a Saturday show, replacing Clara Amfo, 33. Matt Edmondson, 32, and the Saturdays singer Mollie King, 30, will co-present between 1pm and 4pm, taking over from the 44-year old Scott Mills. Mills will take on the Official Chart from 4pm to 7pm.
Since taking the reins in 2011, Cooper has been on a mission to drive listening of the radio show up among the 15 to 29-year-old age group.
Cooper, who maintains Radio 1 is still “the most relevant youth brand in the UK”, says its digital brand presence is growing well with its YouTube and Vevo channels receiving an average of more than 1.6m views a day and its iPlayer radio channel receiving more than 1.1m hits a month.
Radio 1 celebrated its 50th anniversary last year with the launch of a popup station called Radio 1 Vintage, which started with a show presented by Grimshaw and Blackburn. Previous presenters of the breakfast show include Noel Edmonds, Simon Mayo, Sara Cox and Zoë Ball.
