FREQUENT trails on Radio 4 are reminding listeners to the Daily Service, the long-running weekday act of worship, that they will no longer be able to do so on Long Wave radio after the end of March, when the platform will close.
The BBC announced its decision in 2022, and confirmed it last May. The service will move to Radio 4 Extra via DAB radio, and continue to be available online and on BBC Sounds, along with the Shipping Forecast, the longer version of Yesterday in Parliament, and Test Match Special.
Sir John Reith agreed to the broadcast service’s inception in 1928 after a campaign by Kathleen Cordeaux for a daily “evensong of the air”. It has variously been studio-based and church-based, first in All Souls’, Langham Place, and later in Emmanuel Church, Didsbury, when the Religious Broadcasting department moved to Manchester in 1993.
It was confined to Long Wave in the 1990s, to enable Radio 4 FM to carry a 15-minute serial reading in the parallel slot. The programme celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2008, when a piece in the Church Times forecast: “It may yet make its centenary” (News, 4 January 2008).
Long Wave is owned and operated by a third party, Arqiva, and is described by the BBC as “coming to the end of its life as a technology”. Only a handful of platforms remain around the world: in Romania, Poland, Algeria, Morocco, and Mongolia.
Arqiva has described the technology as energy-intensive, and said that significant further investment would be required to continue it. Radio fans are reported to like the lack of high-fidelity, and many expats reportedly still use Long Wave signals to connect with home.
The BBC has long pointed to the increased popularity of digital listening over the past decade, and listeners’ growing familiarity with gaining access to content elsewhere on the BBC. The BBC did not provide listening figures, a spokesperson said on Tuesday, but described the number of people still choosing to listen on Long Wave as “incredibly small”.
It reiterated: “No programmes will be lost, and the BBC has been running a targeted information campaign to ensure listeners know how they can hear their favourite Radio 4 LW programmes elsewhere on the BBC.
“We always work closely with organisations that support vulnerable audiences around the time of any platform closure, ensuring that we migrate listeners to our other platforms in a timely and sensitive manner.”
But a longstanding listener to the Daily Service described the decision as “outrageous”. The Revd Angela Robinson, a retired teacher and Congregational minister, described the quality of the content as “still extraordinarily high”, and decried taking the programme off Long Wave.
“Those who want to hear it must now be capable of setting an alarm to remind them to switch over, which surely makes problems for many of all age groups, particularly those who cannot do this without assistance, like the sick and the frail elderly, for whom this is physically challenging,” she said.
Alternative ways of listening, on smartphones and laptops, might not be viable for many of these, especially those in care and “anxious not to make a fuss. Some churches have made a noble effort to take Christian worship into care homes, but what a tiny contribution that is, compared with getting a 15-minute act of worship back on to accessible radio for all.”