Radio 5 switches to Live output

Sunday morning at 8.30 and the final live children's programme on the doomed Radio 5 was being produced from a cramped basement in Broadcasting House, bringing to an end a brave two-and-a-half-year experiment to attract children to speech radio.

Young listeners were phoning Mark Curry's Weekend Edition to say goodbye to the characters in Wiggly Park, a five-minute serial about animals who live on a threatened plot of land. For all its inventiveness, the show apparently died with the network after 520 episodes.

Farewell Radio 5, welcome Radio 5 Live, which this morning offered its first menu of rolling news and sport. The 90,000 children who listened yesterday will have to tune in to Radio 4 for a substitute service.

Sally Kennedy, producer of Weekend Edition, snorted disdainfully at her control panel: 'These kids don't know where Radio 4 is.' She has still to negotiate herself a new job, like many of the 86 people made redundant by the network's closure. More than 150 staff, mainly from local radio, have been recruited for the new network. Next Sunday morning, instead of children's programmes, there will be a news magazine show.

'It is terribly sad,' Pat Ewing, Radio 5's controller, said as the final minutes of Weekend Edition closed in. David Harding, her deputy, added: 'I feel grief and bereavement. It has been such fun and a wonderful freedom. That is why there has been so much innovation. Radio 5 had a creative atmosphere which allowed people to experiment'.

As the original came off-air, the latest research showed Radio 5 to be one of the few BBC networks on the rise: it attracted 4.9 million listeners a week, compared with 4 million in the last quarter of 1993.

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