BBC Radio 4 live

BBC Radio 4 is the BBC's national speech station and the second most listened-to station in the UK after Radio 2, reaching more than nine million people a week. It launched on 30 September 1967, replacing the BBC Home Service, and broadcasts from Broadcasting House in London. Almost nothing on Radio 4 is music. The schedule is made up of news and current affairs, documentaries, drama, comedy, science and history. Its best-known programmes are institutions in their own right: Today, the weekday morning news programme that sets the political agenda, presented by Justin Webb, Nick Robinson, Emma Barnett and Anna Foster; The World at One and PM; Woman's Hour; Desert Island Discs; and The Archers, the everyday story of country folk, broadcast since 1951. It also carries the Shipping Forecast, a maritime weather bulletin more than 150 years old whose steady reading of sea areas has become part of British culture. Radio 4 is the BBC's most expensive national radio network, costing £87 million in 2024/25, and few countries sustain anything comparable: a mass-audience speech station that runs original drama and panel comedy in peak hours alongside serious journalism. Radio 4 broadcasts on FM between 92.5 and 104.9 MHz depending on area, on DAB and on BBC Sounds. Its long wave service on 198 kHz closed on 27 June 2026.