BBC Radio 2 bosses have spoken to Music Week about the lasting power of radio, on the eve of the station’s flagship live music event Radio 2 In The Park.
Helen Thomas, Radio 2's head of station and Jeff Smith, head of music at Radio 2 & 6 Music, are this year heading to Stirling’s City Park for the festival. The 2026 edition runs from tomorrow (September 11) until Sunday (September 13).
Chaka Khan and Simple Minds headline the event on Saturday and Sunday, respectively, with The Script, ABC, Emeli Sandé, Jack Savoretti, Lulu, Texas, Level 42, James Blunt, Blue, Cast, Appleton and Deacon Blue on the bill elsewhere.
Thomas and Smith are both “really excited” to be "packing up the whole of Radio 2" and taking it to Stirling.
“When you put together this sort of line-up, it's just so great. All the hard work in getting it to Sterling, into City Park, and then seeing all those artists live and direct will be a glorious moment,” Smith said.
People want that collective experience, companionship, connection and curation…
Helen Thomas
This year’s edition also features an expanded DJ Stage schedule, with BBC Radio 2 presenters spinning records during Friday’s pre-party as well as on the Saturday and Sunday.
“Genuinely, this is the highlight of the year for many of our presenters,” said Thomas. “It is the one time in the year where they all get to go on, effectively, a huge school trip.”
“The DJ Stage really reflects the breadth of our station and celebrates our amazing presenters,” she added. “So whether it's Tony Blackburn doing his Golden Hour, which will incite a conga, Romesh Ranganathan doing his hip-hop set, or Jo Whiley doing her Shiny Happy Playlist, they all love it.
“But, without doubt, the person who is most excited this year is ‘DJ Vinyl’ Jeremy Vine, who is taking to the stage for the first time ever. He's been banging on my door ever since the DJ tent came into being in Preston at Radio 2 In The Park. With his Hits And Headlines set, I’m expecting to hear a remix of BBC News! It’ll be a lot of fun.”
Simple Minds
Those not attending this year’s festival will be able to get in on the action, broadcast across BBC Radio 2, BBC Sounds and iPlayer.
It marks the fourth year the festival has taken place outside London in the wake of editions in Leicester, Preston and Chelmsford in 2023, 2024 and 2025, respectively.
Meanwhile, Radio 2 pulled in 12.37 million listeners in Q2 2026 to maintain its status as the UK’s single biggest radio station. Weekly listeners were down just 2% year-on-year, according to the RAJAR report.
“It’s a real testament to the fact that people want that collective experience, they want the companionship, they want the connection, they want a curated musical experience,” Thomas said of the latest results.
“What Jeff and the music team do is world class, second to none. When I hear the range that we play at Radio 2, no one else is operating in this arena, no one comes close, with 15,000 individual records aired every single year. That's our secret sauce, really.”
Here, Thomas and Smith share more about this year’s In The Park offering, how creatively “on fire” Radio 2 is at present, and the “sometimes forgotten” power of discovery via the medium of radio…
What drew you to go across the border into Scotland for this year’s edition?
Helen Thomas: “We haven't taken Radio 2 en masse like this to Scotland since 2018 when we did the Biggest Weekend in Perth. We've had, on a show level, various programmes doing outside broadcasts from Scotland. Every time in the last three years when we've announced where we're going, we've always had a big response from our Scottish listeners saying, ‘When are you coming north of the border?’ This is in a way a direct response to listener demand.”
And why Stirling in particular?
HT: “When we look at locations, we're looking for really basic things. There needs to be a park, it needs to be really big, it needs to be really flat, and there needs to be lots of great transport infrastructure around that park. We’re bringing in a huge volume of people in and out of a particular town or city over the course of one weekend. We're going to City Park, which will have Stirling Castle as the backdrop, and it’s going to look beautiful on the television, too. And Stirling Council has been a dream to work with – so helpful, accommodating and thoughtful.”
You have plenty of Scottish acts on the line-up – from Sunday night headliners Simple Minds, to Lulu, Texas, Emily Sandé and more. Is that important?
Jeff Smith: “When we set the line-up together, it was really important to reflect Scotland in what we're doing, but not at the cost of great artists. That's what we can do. We've got a line-up of headlines there, from front to back, opening to end. We've always put very big names at the start of our show because not only are we delivering a show for the audience in City Park, as it is this year, but also: it's a radio show, it has to work on Radio 2. So, opening this year with Texas and Deacon Blue, I mean, both of those could headlight the event. It's brilliant that they're opening the show for us so that people turn up from the very start.
It's about having that awareness, thinking about how the festival will flow like how Radio 2 flows during a regular daytime.
Jeff Smith
"And then Lulu is so iconic in Scotland and to so many people's histories. She’s multi-generational as well, like Radio 2, and she's been all through those decades. That whole range on the line-up – also bringing in huge international artists like the headliner Chaka Khan – will be a great, fun party on the Saturday night. And then Simple Minds – I’m so pleased that we've built a great relationship with them over the years and are able to bring them back to Scotland where they come from.”
Vernon Kay and Chaka Khan
The line-up arguably skews to an older audience. Is that intentional, bearing in mind your listenership at BBC Radio 2?
JS: “We’re appealing to a very broad audience. Demographics can sometimes get in the way of these sorts of things, because we know how people consume music nowadays; it's age-agnostic, certainly decade-agnostic. What we're trying to do is reflect not just that [Radio 2] audience but also a family audience – and obviously other people come to see the show. It’s really important within the music that we plot out that we should embrace, you know, Lulu who started up in the ’60s, Chaka Khan who started up in the ’70s, Level 42 in the ’80s, The Script in the noughties. It's about having that awareness – not for the sake of just looking at eras – but also thinking about how it will flow like how Radio 2 flows, how we flow in our music during a regular daytime. So, yeah, that goes through my mind, but it doesn't take over all my thoughts. In the end, it's about representing and celebrating a range of genres and artists in exactly the same way as you do with music policy across radio.”
In April, the festival had to be moved from August to this month to assist with clashes with Scottish independent festivals. How much of an impact do you foresee that will make on attendance?
HT: “It was a big decision. It’s not easy to lift up an event that has been months and months and months in the planning and move it, but we did. Jeff was incredible in terms of talking to and securing our artists and being able to move them across. And Scottish audiences are not going to let us down. They are going to come, they are going to turn out. We see this event as squeezing the last drops out of the summer before everyone gets their head down.”
Creatively right now, Radio 2 is properly on fire
Helen Thomas
How challenging or not is it to help steer Radio 2 In The Park? And on top of your everyday duties?
JS: “Speaking about lineups and booking the lineups, I've been doing some for around 30 years. But I'm by no means used to it – they're always surprising! The key point in this is having all those relationships with the industry, the record labels, the managers – increasingly more and more with managers and artists. The big challenge, which I think the industry finds at the moment, clearly is economic. I have to say, out of all my experiences, the reputation of Radio 2 holds a hell of a lot, because people love what we do and see how special we are in the whole music ecosystem. As a result, we do get people looking kindly upon us. I've got a good reputation; I can make things happen. But, actually, it's great to have this radio station behind me as well, and how well it's thought of by the music industry, artists and managers.”
HT: “From my perspective, we have world-class teams working here. Our live events team is world class. A number of artists last year in particular spoke to both Jeff and myself saying that it was the best-organised festival they’d played all year. Bryan Adams was one of them. The artists love it because there are so many people – like all our presenters – milling around the stage. I remember seeing Suede’s Brett Anderson literally run across the presenter compound to embrace Mark Radcliffe once. It's a very friendly vibe. And I've got to shine a light on Laura Busson, Radio 2's commissioning executive, who does all the hard graph in wrestling those presenter schedules. She has a spreadsheet that would make your brain explode! We are blessed because we have just brilliant teams who do this day in, day out. I trust in my teams because I know that they have done this time and time again – and they will do it again when we get up to Scotland.”
The general power and impact of music radio gets a little forgotten about in the industry
Jeff Smith
More broadly, in the latest RAJAR results, Radio 2 has seen only a 1% drop in ratings from the previous quarter despite something of a tumultuous period in the wake of Scott Mills’ sacking. How are you feeling about it all?
HT: “Creatively right now, Radio 2 is properly on fire. Sara Cox coming in to do the breakfast show – I have never known a radio show launch with five star reviews. She's absolutely smashing it. It’s so great to hear Sara flexing her interviewing muscle, which she didn't get the opportunity to do when she was doing the teatime slot. And we’ve announced the return of Trevor Nelson. Honestly, we talk about Radio 2 being a family. It's true; the Trevor news [of his brain tumour diagnosis] hit very, very hard when he had to take his enforced break. But it’s such amazing news of his recovery. We’ve got Children In Need just around the corner, Radio 2 had a great year at the ARIAs – one of our best years. I'm feeling pretty good to be bringing in 12.4 million listeners every single week at a time when the audio marketplace has just exploded.”
JS: “Earlier, we were talking about the general power and impact of music radio. We’re seeing Ella Langley hit No. with Choosin’ Texas. It's a record that began in November last year on Radio Two. We added it to our A-list in January. But the broader picture – something to the credit of a lot of what we do in BBC Music – is the power of curators, the gatekeepers, the people who are sifting through thousands of releases every week to find five or six adds onto the playlist. And it's doing that in the face of infinite musical choice. We work really hard on that. Sometimes that gets a little forgotten about in the industry, because there are so many ways that people consume music. I wanted to mention that, because radio is still very important.”
