BBC to Axe You and Yours and Remake Radio 4 Speech Slate
The BBC plans to axe Radio 4's You and Yours after more than 50 years as part of programme closures tied to £500m in cuts and a shift toward digital content. The Guardian
You and Yours has investigated consumer concerns since the 1970s. Its planned removal ends a long-running daytime consumer affairs strand on the network.
The same package will end Thinking Allowed, Free Thinking and The Artificial Human. The magazine show Open Country will also end. The World Tonight will close next spring after more than 50 years on air.
The World Tonight closure was previously described as part of a first round of sweeping BBC cuts. The current plan confirms its end date as next spring.
Two as-yet unnamed weekly programmes will replace the ended shows and will run all year round. One will cover ideas shaping lives and the wider world. The other will examine the impact of technology and AI.
Start the Week and In Our Time will expand to an hour under the plan. Farming Today's weekend edition will be expanded. BBC Radio 5 Live will reduce spending on sports podcasts from next year.
Director General Matt Brittin has instructed the BBC to move away from content that can work only on a single platform. Jonathan Wall is director of BBC Sounds.
The instruction defines the commissioning test. Programmes must function across broadcast and on-demand. Single-platform origin is no longer sufficient justification for renewal.
The broader context here is distribution and cost operating together. Year-round weekly titles simplify scheduling and reuse. They avoid seasonal gaps. They travel more easily between linear transmission and podcast feeds.
Looking at what this means for suppliers and schedulers, the trade is explicit. Loss of established specialist strands is exchanged for fewer, longer-running formats with broader remits. An ideas programme and a technology and AI programme consolidate ground previously held by separate arts, sociology and science titles. Hour-long expansions for Start the Week and In Our Time concentrate intellectual capital in flagship brands.
For consumer and rural coverage, the calculation is tighter. You and Yours and Open Country served defined constituencies with service journalism and place-based reporting. Farming Today gains weekend capacity. The risk is breadth replacing depth. Generalist successors can acknowledge those audiences without reproducing the casework and fieldwork that sustained loyalty.
