From a BBC press release quoting Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer:

Go4it has done its very best to reach a children’s audience. Barney and the team have done a terrific job in creating some fine programmes – last year’s programme on bereavement was particularly outstanding – but we have to shape the schedule in the best interests of our listeners and we have not been able to find a successful way of putting a programme for children on an adult radio station.

I could have told them that years ago. Go4It always felt like one of those programmes that was only on because it was the BBC and the BBC has to do minority things, so its disappearance from the schedules as of the end of spring won’t be a great surprise.

But just because ‘it’s the BBC’ surely isn’t sufficient justification for putting a programme like Go4It onto a mainstream network like Radio 4 when none of the intended audience is listening. According to The Guardian:

Damazer said that this year Go4it sometimes registered zero listeners from its target four-to-14 age range… The average age of its 450,000 listeners was between 52 and 55, Damazer said.

Far better to hive it off somewhere else. Like online, perhaps.

Of course, Go4It was never aimed at me so perhaps it’s best that I didn’t like it or it would be doing something wrong (or perhaps I would be doing something wrong). It’s like the way I can’t stand Radio 1, but then that’s how it should be – I’m well outside of its target audience.

The difference between Go4It and Radio 1, though, is that you always know – more or less – what you’re going to get when you turn to Radio 1, whereas kids (or more likely their parents) have to remember when Go4It is on and actively tune to it at the right time.

In an age when you can turn to Cbeebies pretty much any time of the day for some Roary the Racing Car or In the Night Garden, its days were clearly numbered.

It was probably doomed from the start.

It won’t be missed.

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