BBC Radio 4 has lost hundreds of thousands of listeners amid a slump in the Today programme audience.

Official figures show that the flagship current affairs programme has lost around 375,000 weekday listeners since October 2022.

This has contribued to an overall shrinking in audience numbers for Radio 4, which has lost 477,000 listeners. 

The BBC World Service has experienced an ever sharper drop in listeners, with its average weekly audience falling 33 per cent from 1.4 million in July-September 2021, to 940,000 in the same period in 2023.

However, the corporation saw more favourable responses to its other stations, including Radio 3, which grew its audience by 17 per cent partly thanks to a popular Proms season.

Radio 2’s audience also appears to have stabilised following the departure of the veteran broadcaster Ken Bruce. 

The station had an average of 13.5 million listeners in the third quarter of the year, broadly unchanged on the previous three months, after a drop of one million from 14.5 million in January-March.