Was Chris Moyles’ on-air fatigue rubbing off on his listeners when he left Radio One? Today (October 25, 2012), Radio Times have reported that Moyles’ listener figures were at an all-time low when he left his breakfast show on the station last month. The figures, published by RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research), revealed that Moyles’ audience had dropped from a one-time high of 8 million listeners, to 6.73 million.

The Radio 4 Today show beat Moyles' breakfast show, with an average audience of 6.94 million between July and September. Moyles' audience had dropped by another 200,000 since the figures were last recorded and made for the lowest audience for the show, since the start of 2006. When Chris Moyles left the station, after an eight year stint, he was replaced by Nick Grimshaw. Grimshaw is 11 years younger than Moyles and it’s reported that Radio One’s controller, Ben Cooper, felt under pressure to regain a more youthful audience for the show. We won’t know how well Grimshaw’s doing until the New Year, when the audience figures for his first quarter in the job will have been published.

Those figures for Radio 4 and Radio 1 seemed to reflect overall trends at the two stations; Radio 4’s average weekly reach had expanded by 2.7% to 10.85 million listeners, whereas Radio 1’s average weekly reach had dropped by 5.5% to 11.9 million.