Audience figures show why BBC said TTFN to Sir Jimmy Young

The myth of Sir Jimmy Young was finally laid to rest yesterday when official figures showed his temporary replacement pulled in an extra 250,000 listeners.

Brian Hayes filled in at the end of last year when the veteran presenter was recovering from a hip operation and drew an average of 5.7 million listeners during his time with the lunchtime show.

In an apparent vindication of the BBC's decision that the time had come for Young, 81, to move on, this was a bigger audience than his figures in the previous three months. After his formal retirement in December, Young made clear his anger at the BBC and claimed he was dropped because of his age. His full-time replacement, Jeremy Vine, has now taken over.

The success of the stand-in helped to boost Radio 2 to yet another record-breaking quarter, with its audience now at 13.3 million, up almost a million on the year before.

There was disappointing news for another radio stalwart, Chris Tarrant at Capital, who had 100,000 fewer listeners on the previous quarter, down to 1.94 million. Sara Cox at Radio 1, BamBam on Kiss FM, and Virgin radio dented his audience share.

The figures by Rajar (the Radio Joint Audience Research) also found that old-fashioned sex and adultery had prompted near-record figures for The Archers on Radio 4. The story of Brian Aldridge's affair with the fiery Irish woman Siobhan Hathaway drew 4.7 million people a week, with 2.1 million listeners for the omnibus.