Hundreds of thousands of listeners have deserted since he took over from Zoe Ball. Filling her shoes will take time – but the truth is that Mills is only a small part of the mass migration away from Radio 2
When in November, after almost six years as host of Radio 2’s Breakfast Show, Zoe Ball announced her departure, she claimed it was “time to step away from the very early mornings and focus on family”. It was hard to blame her. That’s a half-decade of 3:30am alarms, bleary-eyed taxis to New Broadcasting House through dark winter mornings, and then three hours of non-stop, highly caffeinated broadcasting. Ball understandably wanted out – but the latest listening figures suggest that a large chunk of her audience have also embraced their new lie-ins.
Data from Rajar, the quarterly measurement of UK radio, suggest that 600,000 listeners to The Radio 2 Breakfast Show have departed since Ball was replaced by Scott Mills. That still means that Mills is the most-heard breakfast host in the country, purely by dint of Radio 2 being such a dominant force in the sunrise hours. But the station at large is surrounded by challenges, with its reach falling to an audience of just 12.6m – the lowest figure in 20 years. Naturally, pundits who find Mills’s cheerfully mainstream radio persona grating have rushed to blame him. “Scott Mills helps drag Radio 2 to record low listening figures,” read one brutal headline.
In reality, Mills is but a small part of this mass migration away from Radio 2. For a long time, the BBC had been almost unchallenged in the middle-age market, allowing its second station to assume its lofty position. But challengers from the private sector in recent years have threatened the incumbent. Bauer launched Greatest Hits Radio in 2019, focusing on 1970s to 1990s pop and rock, poaching presenters like Ken Bruce and Simon Mayo from the BBC. Though they fell this quarter, GHR is still reaching an audience of 6.7m. Meanwhile, Boom Radio – a station launched in 2021 specifically targeting baby boomers – is up 14.5 per cent year-on-year, and approaching a million listeners. Increased competition in the talk radio space – where LBC and Talk now face off against Times Radio – also impacts Radio 2’s audience share.
And then there’s the transition from Ball to Mills. Radio has proven an incredibly resilient medium in the face of seemingly existential challenges, first from television (narrowly survived) and then from on-demand audio like podcasts (comfortably survived). Part of that toughness is the incredibly sticky audiences who evangelise for their favourite presenters with a zealotry usually reserved for organised religion or professional football. It gives talent – the top tier of presenters – incredible industrial power, and changes to scheduling frequently result in audience dips. For Mills, these teething problems happen to coincide with a broader environment where all the BBC’s popular music stations (1, 1Xtra, 2, and 6 Music) saw year-on-year decline.
This depressive atmosphere doesn’t help Mills. He is the latest product at the end of a well-recognised pipeline from Radio 1 to Radio 2. The thought, presumably, is that you get young DJs to champion new music for fresh-faced audiences, and then graduate them up the stations as they, and their established fanbase, age. Since 2010, the Radio 2 breakfast gig has been exclusively held by former Radio 1 DJs: two former hosts of the breakfast show (Ball and Chris Evans), and one early breakfast show man (Mills). But this conveyor belt only makes sense in a world where Radio 1 audiences are genuinely moving with their hosts. Now, Radio 1 appears to be in terminal decline, and its listeners who have aged out of Sabrina Carpenter and Yung Gravy are dispersing. Some to Greatest Hits Radio, some to LBC, some to podcasts about serial killers, and some – but only some – to Radio 2.
And so, for his new listeners on Radio 2, Mills is probably best known as someone who would occasionally stand in for Steve Wright or Ken Bruce. A substitute teacher, when your beloved schoolmaster has the flu. It will take time for him to shake that reputation, and time is not a luxury he, or his bosses, have. There are plenty in the private sector who will see these listening figures and sense an opportunity to exploit a rare frailty in the impregnable BBC armour. Before long, the storied reign of Radio 2 as king of the airwaves could be over.
