Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Industrial Context: BBC Radio 4

Radio 4 is the second most popular radio station in the UK after Radio 2 and it is most popular in the South of England and London. It is considered by many to be the flagship radio service of the BBC and it is also the most expensive. It has no commercial competition as a speech-based radio station. The remit of Radio 4 is to be mixed speech service offering news, talk shows, drama and comedy. It is famous for recurrently featuring alternative comedy and has served as a platform for many new comedians to launch their careers.


Radio 4 has been criticised by the right wing press of taking a left wing approach on topics such as the Iraq War. However they have also been accused of being too middle class and have been criticised of not being appealing to the youth, women and non-white listeners. Since the purpose of my brief is to create a programme that would increase the audience range of the station, I would have to take these criticisms into account during production.


Radio 4 has a sister channel Radio 4 Extra which is the BBC's primary spoken programme archive. It broadcasts both archived programming as well as extended and companion pieces to Radio 4. It would be of interest to look at the scheduled programming of Radio 4 Extra as well in order to fully understand the range of shows offered on Radio 4.

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