The BBC deserves its declining audience figures

So, the figures are in. The total weekly audience for BBC Radio 2 has dropped by a million in the last three months. Those are the three months, significantly, since the somewhat rushed and awkward departure of its biggest draw, the immaculate and imperturbable Ken Bruce.

Radio 4 has likewise managed to lose 1.3 million more listeners in the last year. And television? The BBC’s terrestrial audience is heading down the pan too, with BBC1 losing 12 per cent of viewers in the last five years, and ‘sales volumes’ of the TV licence, according to the recent statement from the Television Licence Fee Trust, falling by about two million over roughly the same period.

As I wrote earlier this year, the BBC’s casual tinkering and tampering with something as precious to them – let alone to us the listeners – as Ken Bruce’s contract was a sign of something having gone very wrong there.