- Radio wails - 31st October 2025
- Andy Pandy - 30th October 2025
- Labour pains - 28th October 2025
The latest extraordinary audience figures for Wales’ solitary national English-language radio station remain appalling, and compare extremely unfavourably with other national broadcasters around the UK, reflecting shocking numbers for Welsh media outlets generally today.
The new set of RAJARs for BBC Cymru Radio Wales (RW) show an audience of just 290,000, with a ‘share’ of available listeners standing at only 4.3 per cent.
However the proportionate listenership for BBC Radio Ulster (RU) is FAR higher, with the ‘reach’ at 17 per cent, and earlier in the year, in figures which were themselves described at the time as “hideous”, the numbers for RW were 341,000 in terms of audience, and five per cent in relation to ‘share’.
This worrying trend is set against an alarming backdrop.
The paper where our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, began his long award-winning journalistic career (the South Wales Echo [SWE]) used to be the biggest-selling paper produced in Wales with a circulation of almost 100,000.
Now it sells just 2,735 copies, and was long ago overtaken by other papers in Wales.
The South Wales Evening Post (SWEP), for example, is today bought by 3,560 people.
The best performing in the UK is the Aberdeen Press and Journal (P&J) at 19,525 – figures about which executives at the SWE can only dream.
All newspapers have suffered at the hands of the internet, and every one of them has a website version, but other papers have declined less than the SWE.
So even in like-for-like comparison it appears the SWE is performing worse than its rivals.
Traditionally broadcast audiences have been higher, but the drop here is proportionately even worse
Phil (who spent seven years presenting programmes at RW) has been left reeling by the latest numbers at the station where he used to work. He hosted the lunchtime programme, Wales at One (WaO), the drive-time show Good Evening Wales (GEW), as well as the weekly debate series People’s Assembly (PA), and was aghast: “These figures are truly awful“.
He added: “clearly they are doing something VERY wrong. Why are the audience statistics in other areas so much better?!”.
Previous abysmal numbers came out as Carolyn Hitt assumed her unenviable position as the station’s head, and outraged listeners, said the output was “inane” as well as a “self-parody”
Another critic made the point about the interesting timing, and said about those appalling audience figures: “(They) coincided exactly with the new Radio Wales editor (and ex Western Mail columnist) Carolyn Hitt sitting in the editors seat after taking over…”.
Perhaps emphasising the recent difficulties, the headline-grabbing ‘Director of Content and Services’ Rhuanedd Richards, had earlier described the then new ‘Editor of BBC Radio Wales and Sport’, Ms Hitt, as a “brilliant addition to the team”.
But in the eulogy to her she failed to mention that homosexuality is unlawful in the host nation of the 2022 football World Cup, Qatar, where Wales qualified, and Ms Hitt transmitted match details on RW.
Being gay carries a punishment of up to three years in prison there, as well as earning the possibility of the death penalty for Muslims under sharia law.
Also conspicuous by its absence in Ms Richards’ praising speech, was that Ms Hitt had also said in the past on Twitter (now X) that she votes for the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru (Plaid), and is prepared to “pick up the ball” for independence, when the news service she is overseeing is meant to be neutral.
Ms Hitt is herself gay, which may have made it difficult monitoring coverage of matches there.
Past years have been almost as bad for RW.
In 2020 the equivalent statistics revealed a slight increase on the previous year, but a substantial drop compared with two years earlier, a massive decrease on the year before that, and how more than 40,000 listeners had been lost in one three month period, despite the cash spent on new schedules.
They also showed that the total listening hours were 2,667,000, down from 3,074,000 in September 2019 (although up from 2,147,000 in December 2018).
A former RW executive, told The Eye at the time a previous quarter’s atrocious listening figures were released that: “It’s (the audience numbers are) peaking at weekdays mid mornings, with Wynne Evans (now disgraced and sacked from the airwaves) the only highlight. There’s an over reliance on celebrities who have little or no substance, and the breakfast programme is a disgrace”.
One of the main presenters at RW during its launch, re-stated his call for the people in charge to resign. Mike Flynn said: “I would like to know what the real figures are across daytimes and weekends and how they waste over £18 million. It is about time they started to answer a few questions.”
Unfortunately we know some of the latest figures today – and, as with local newspapers in Wales – they don’t look good…
Details of Phil’s astonishing decades-long journalistic career (including his years at the BBC and on the South Wales Echo), as he was gripped by the rare and incurable neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in an important book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now.
Next week – more problems for the BBC, this time at a network level, as we report why disturbing news that in a huge survey of audiences many view the UK’s biggest broadcaster as not independent, puts centre stage how the corporation’s Tim Davie may lose his job, as well as executives REFUSAL to answer The Eye’s questions about the list of appalling scandals at his organisation.
