Zoe Ball’s Radio 2 show enjoys the biggest audience of listeners for any breakfast programme in the UK, though figures have fallen slightly in recent years.
An average of 6.28 million people tuned in to her show each week between July and September of this year, according to the latest available data from the audience research body Rajar.
This is comfortably ahead of the largest national commercial breakfast show in the country on Heart Radio, presented by Jamie Theakston and Amanda Holden, which averaged 4.05 million listeners in the same period.
It is also bigger than the audiences for other BBC radio breakfast programmes, including Today on Radio 4 (5.85 million) and Greg James on Radio 1 (4.31 million).
But it is the lowest figure for Zoe Ball’s show in the three years since publication of listening figures resumed after a pause due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The first data reported by Rajar after the Covid break was for the extended period of July to October 2021 and showed Zoe Ball had an average weekly audience of 7.22 million.
This is more than 900,000 higher than the 6.28 million listeners for July to September 2024.
It has not been a steady decline, as there have been some occasions where her numbers have increased on the previous three months.
Overall, however, the figures suggest the audience for the Radio 2 breakfast show has been on a broad but gentle downwards path in the past three years, dropping below seven million in April-June 2023 and below six-and-a-half million in April-June 2024.
Such a trend is not unique to Zoe Ball, with both the Radio 4 Today programme and the 5 Live breakfast show experiencing a similar long-term dip in listeners over the past three years, though, as with Radio 2, the pattern is not steady and there are spikes in the figures coinciding with big news and sport events.
These changes in audience numbers are also likely to reflect shifts in listening habits in the UK, such as the growing popularity of podcasts, or for experiencing radio shows in clip form on social media.
Rajar paused the publication of listening figures after the period January-March 2020, as the start of the pandemic meant the organisation could no longer collect survey data in person.
None of the pre-Covid figures are directly comparable with those published since Rajar resumed its reporting in autumn 2021, due to changes in the way the data is compiled and calculated.
