“People have been talking about the demise of radio forever,” Stuart Maconie told me in February. Even the 1984 Queen song “Radio Ga Ga”, the broadcaster said, is all about television overtaking radio as the most popular form of home entertainment. Today it is music streaming that is radio’s biggest threat, but the format is far from dead.
Maconie was one of the original presenters on BBC Radio 6 Music when it launched in 2002. The station, which celebrates its 20th anniversary on 11 March, is today the UK’s most popular digital radio offering, attracting 2.6 million listeners in the last quarter of 2021, according to Radio Joint Audience Research (Rajar). And Maconie is still a regular, presenting the weekend breakfast show with his longtime co-host Mark Radcliffe – or “whatever that guy’s name is,” he joked – and The Freak Zone on Sunday nights, where he broadcasts everything from avant-garde vocal music to saxophone-led post-punk.
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