BBC axes long-running Radio 4 show You and Yours in push towards podcasts

Thinking Allowed, The Artificial Human and Free Thinking among other programmes hit by £500m cuts

BBC Radio 4’s consumer rights show You and Yours is to be axed after more than 50 years, becoming one of the latest victims of the corporation’s £500m cuts plan.

Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed, Free Thinking and The Artificial Human will also end, to be replaced by two as yet unnamed weekly programmes that will run all year round. One will cover “the ideas shaping our lives and the wider world”; the other will examine the impact of technology and AI.

Their schedules and subject matter have been chosen to allow them to work as regular podcasts as the BBC attempts to reshape its content for the podcast boom.

The changes follow an instruction from Matt Brittin, the BBC’s director general, that the broadcaster should move away from content that can work only on a single platform.

The BBC said the You and Yours team was already developing a refreshed consumer programme “designed to work both on air and on demand that builds on Radio 4’s tradition of original reporting, practical advice and holding organisations to account”.

“I don’t see any podcast that is covering the sort of area that You and Yours has so comprehensively and effectively covered over the years,” he said. “They haven’t said what it’s going to be replaced with exactly, but if the BBC drops this, we could be losing quite an important resource.”

Elsewhere, BBC Radio 5 Live will reduce spending on sports podcasts from next year to make way for new shows.

However, the closure of You and Yours and The World Tonight has puzzled many senior media figures. Some believe Brittin should have waited to make the cuts until he had completed talks with the government about the BBC’s future funding.

“That means accelerating growth on our own digital platforms and reaching more people, beyond the BBC, while maintaining the strength of Radio 4 and 5 Live, the country’s two biggest speech radio stations,” he said.

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