[interestednovice]

Hard to see the plans for Four Extra fully closing happening for at least a while with all the expansions happening. Linear radio content seems to holding up well fairly well in terms of demand across the sector.

Now that some content from Radio 4 Long Wave has shifted to Radio 4 Extra, I don’t think they plan to close it any more.

Closing it was always a bit of a random idea anyway, since it must be very cheap to run so it would hardly save any money.

In my mind, Perfect Curve W1A types just said: “Radio 4 Extra, isn’t…like…. one Radio 4 enough? Snooze-fest, am I right?!” and then decided to close it. Presumably this was because they envisaged that archive drama and comedy would be on BBC Sounds. But really, there is no harm in having Radio 4 Extra and it provides an important linear outlet for that niche content from Radio 4 which was displaced with the loss of a separate LW schedule.