Radio 4 is in trouble. Listening figures for the station have dipped to their lowest level since 2007. The Today programme, Radio 4’s flagship morning show, is doing particularly badly: its audience fell 12 per cent year on year, from 6.5 million to 5.7 million, according to Rajar. For anyone who has tuned in to Radio 4 recently, this decline won’t come as a surprise.

‘I’ll just stick Radio 4 on’ was the default habit of my life when bored, from about the age of ten in 1978 to fifty in 2018. It felt like the still, reliable centre of the nation. It was also handy as a blood pressure reducing device. But, in the last few years, something changed.

I turned on Radio 4 while writing this to test my theory that you’re never five minutes away from being told off by the 21st century BBC. How long did it take? It took two minutes. An item in You & Yours on herbal teabags revealed that they were organic – hurrah! – but they have too much packaging – boo! (To be fair, You & Yours has long been a marathon whinge.)

The drama and comedy on Radio 4, formerly the jewel in its crown, is now unbearable

I checked again a bit later and immediately got an angry ear blast from environmental campaigner Feargal Sharkey. This was followed by a grovelling ‘What would you like to tell the public?’ interview with Lib Dem leader Ed Davey. Next up was an item about immigration figures which focused on a model, fluent English-speaking Nigerian computer science Masters student, who I might suggest is possibly slightly unrepresentative. (Interestingly, a news report later referred to ‘transitioning’ paedophile sex offender Andrew Miller/‘Amy George’ as a man, which is a first and may be significant.)

The drama and comedy on Radio 4, formerly the jewel in its crown, is now unbearable, a repetitive sequence of ideological agit-prop. The narrow whinge of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hangs heavy in the air.

A quick glance at Radio 4’s drama offerings presents a similar picture. ‘Dedication plays with the idea, for which there’s good evidence, that the Earl of Southampton was a cross dressing homosexual, with whom, it is possible, Shakespeare had an affair’; ‘Lost Paradise – The UK’s first environmental refugees are due to be displaced in the next 20 years’; the unintentionally Ortonesque billing for South on the Great North Road teases us: ‘HGV truck driver Peggy Charlton’s twice-weekly trips to London lead her husband to suspect she has other interests in her life’.

It’s all so pathetic, so desperate and obvious. Shakespeare: a bit gay? You don’t say! Climate change? Really, please do tell me more. A lady driver? Behind the wheel of a pantechnicon? It would all be very shocking in 1953; back then, you would have emptied the streets with that show. But not today. Other highlights in the schedule include This Morning’s Rylan discussing gay penguins and life in Sudan. And more Shakespeare, with a discussion on toxic masculinity in Hamlet.

There is endless tedious huffing and puffing on the same themes, always from the same viewpoint. Even treasured stalwarts like In Our Time have fallen. The last time I tuned in, one guest academic was blithering the usual boilerplate about gender and ‘non-binary’ identities, at which point I expected to hear the satisfying crunch of Melvyn Bragg’s bouffant as he head-butted the miscreant. But this rubbish was instead just nodded along with. Another door closes, another cultural bolt hole gone.

The old Radio 4 was pinkish left-liberal and frequently infuriating, but the new Radio 4’s identitarian turn is a disaster. Even people who agree with the approved line on these issues don’t want to be told off, no matter what they may claim. This is why DEI/woke/whatever-you-call-it has to be pro-actively kicked out of culture. It pretends to be a nice, kind, ‘just good manners’, but – as Radio 4 is discovering – it’s an audience killer.

What is the BBC going to do about declining listener figures? BBC chief content officer (whatever that means) Charlotte Moore-GPT gave a speech last week, in which she stated, in fluent and quite glorious AI: ‘For the BBC to thrive we have to recognise that all audiences are moving decisively towards the digital and on-demand world. Online take up is now growing fastest among audiences who have traditionally been the biggest users of live broadcast services’.

Audience fragmentation because of tech changes is inevitable, yes. But it didn’t have to be this way. The BBC could’ve resisted and held fast; it could have loved the audience it had, not tried to swap them for an imaginary audience of environmental-obsessed non-binary Lib Dems that simply doesn’t exist.