Rajars: Grimshaw climbs

The latest audience figures, out this morning, show that Nick Grimshaw's Radio One breakfast audience is growing, and closing the gap with the position he inherited. MediaGuardian:

The 29-year-old added 709,000 listeners for a total average weekly audience of 6.3 million during the final quarter of last year, a 12.6% rise over the previous period, according to the latest official Rajar figures published on Thursday.

However, Grimshaw is still below the average weekly audience for his first three months on the Radio 1 breakfast show and 400,000 listeners off Moyles's last quarterly audience figure of 6.7 million.

"Congratulations, buddy, although you're still getting fewer listeners than the guy who had to leave Radio One because his audience was distorting the figures and profile for the station as a whole. If you can close that gap, we can start having a pop at you for clearly being too mainstream and pulling an audience outside the target for the network."

Curiously, Grimshaw's growth isn't at the expense of his nearest rival - Chris Evans also added half a million listeners.

6Music is within a nudge of two million listeners across the week, which isn't bad for a station which Mark Thompson wanted to have humanely destroyed.

(They never drag him to Parliament to ask about that, do they? Surely 'writing off the costs involved in establishing a radio station and building its audience' would have been just as expensive as the Digital Media Initiative? Wasn't the original decision, and the need to reverse it, an equally terrible set of events?)