New audience figures show BBC Radio 2 breakfast show lost over 360,000 listeners after the exit of Zoe Ball.

After six years at the slot machine, the speaker hosted her last breakfast program in December, recently taking on a new role at the station on Saturday afternoon.

After departure, DJ Mark Goodier covered the show for most of January until new host Scott Mills took over at the end of that month.

Radio 2 remains the most popular breakfast show in the UK, attracting 6.45 million viewers between January and March, down 5% in the last quarter, according to industry ratings Body Rajar.

Ball added more than 200,000 listeners in the final three months of the show.

After taking over the breakfast show, Mills was replaced by Trevor Nelson on his previous afternoon slot machine, and his evening show was taken over by DJ Spoony.

Vernon Kay attracted 6.73 million viewers in the first three months of 2025, meaning his morning show retained its title as the UK's most popular radio show.

However, the show fell on the 8.2 million viewers of his predecessor, Ken Bruce, who left in 2023.

Rajar said the station's weekly audience dropped by about one million, compared with the total in the last quarter of 2024 at 13.65 million.

Radio 2 Head Helen Thomas said: “Over the quarter of the new daytime schedule that Radio 2 launched in late January, the piano room held some of the most popular musicians throughout February and celebrated country music in March, I’m glad that Radio 2 remains the most popular radio station in the UK with 131,100 listeners a week.”

Listening numbers usually drop with significant timelines, and Ball himself lost nearly 800,000 listeners in 2019 after Chris Evans left.

Breakfast performances often attract more than 9 million listeners during their tenure at Evans. Since then, this number has not matched, although radio audiences have become increasingly dispersed in recent years.

The BBC, especially Radio 2, experienced a turbulent period around 2022, which brought several high-profile figures to leave the station by choosing or changing through schedules.

Elsewhere, the audience of Heart's Breakfast Show, hosted by Jamie Theakston and Amanda Holden, has increased by 250,000.

It attracted 4.3 million record audiences in the first quarter of this year, cementing its position as the UK's most popular commercial breakfast show.

Meanwhile, the first three months of Magic Radio's breakfast show co-hosted by Gok Wan with Harriet Scott, the show's audience slightly increased to 862,000.

However, it still dropped significantly, which was 1.2 million listeners a year ago.

The breakfast show at Capital, hosted by Jordan North, was dropped by 140,000 listeners after the audience leap.

After losing more than a quarter of a million in 2024, the KISS breakfast, hosted by Jordan Banjo and Perri Kiely, climbed 80,000 in the latest quarter.