Ratings for Radio 1’s flagship show have fallen by 1 million listeners to a 12-year low.

BBC Radio 1’s ratings have hit their lowest point in more than a decade, with Nick Grimshaw’s Breakfast Show haemorrhaging almost 1 million listeners alone.

Grimshaw joined the Breakfast Show after Chris Moyles left three years ago in an attempt by the BBC to engage with a younger audience. His show had an average of just 5.5 million listeners in the first three months of the year according to official Rajar listening figures published on Thursday, the lowest level since Sara Cox’s final three months in the chair in 2003.

The losses mirror an overall fall in ratings from Radio 1 as a whole, which has faced stiff competition from digital radio, internet stations and streaming services over the past several years. In the same three month period, Radio 1 had an average of 9.7 million listeners a week – its lowest figure since the end of 2003.

Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper jokingly put the decline in Breakfast Show ratings down to Grimshaw “scaring off the over-30s”, who accounted for around 90% of the outgoing listeners. The station as a whole has lost 830,000 listeners year on year, down from 10.5 million in the same period in 2014, however, the BBC said that more than half a million of those were over 30 years of age – outside its target age of 16 to 29.

It wasn’t all bad news for the BBC – Radio 4’s digital sister station Radio 4 Extra has overtaken Radio 6 Music to become the UK’s most popular digital-only station with 2.17 million listeners. [via The Guardian]