BBC Radio WM is the BBC's local radio station serving the West Midlands. It broadcasts on FM, DAB, digital TV and via BBC Sounds from studios at The Mailbox in Birmingham. According to RAJAR, the station has a weekly audience of 193,000 listeners and a 2.2% share as of December 2023.

History

The station launched as BBC Radio Birmingham on 9 November 1970 and on 23 November 1981, the station changed its name to BBC WM to reflect that the station broadcasts to a wider area than just Birmingham. A short-lived service called WM Heartlands ran between early 1989 and 1991 serving the 'Heartlands' area of East Birmingham using the 1458 medium wave frequency. It ran as an experiment, opting out from 8 am until 12 am. On 30 October 1989, the BBC Asian Network launched as a part time service on BBC WM's MW frequencies (828 and 1458 kHz). In 1996, the Asian Network became a full time service, resulting in BBC WM no longer broadcasting on MW. In the 1990s, as an economic measure, BBC WM took over [BBC Coventry & Warwickshire](https://bliptext.com/articles/bbc-cwr) in Coventry and Warwickshire. On 3 September 2005, CWR resumed the production of separate programming between 5 am and 10 pm each weekday (6 am to 6 pm at weekends). Until 2004, BBC WM was broadcast from the Pebble Mill studios, in Edgbaston. On 4 July that year, the station moved to the new BBC Birmingham city centre offices in The Mailbox. Its facilities include two broadcast studios, a talk studio, an operations and production area, and a studio shared with the BBC Asian Network.

BBC Radio Wolverhampton

On 15 January 2021, BBC Radio Wolverhampton launched as a temporary sister station. The service provided eight hours of opt-out programming for listeners in Wolverhampton and the surrounding area each weekday until 31 March 2021.

Technical

The service is broadcast across the West Midlands on 95.6 FM and DAB from the Sutton Coldfield transmitting station situated north of Birmingham. It also broadcasts on Freeview TV channel 714 in the BBC West Midlands region and streams online via BBC Sounds. The county of Staffordshire does not have its own designated BBC Local Radio so it is served by 3 different stations: mid and north Staffordshire is served by BBC Radio Stoke, East Staffordshire is served by BBC Radio Derby and south Staffordshire is served by BBC Radio WM.

Audience

When it launched, the station had a monopoly of local radio in the Birmingham area. The station's low audience since the advent of Independent Local Radio has led to reports of threatened closure on various occasions. In the mid-1980s, a new manager, Tony Inchley, brought in extensive format changes with a view to stabilising the audience, although the station remained small in listenership numbers.

Programming

Local programming is produced and broadcast from the BBC's Birmingham studios from 6 am to 10 pm on Mondays to Saturdays and from 6 am to 6 pm on Sundays. Off-peak programming, including the late show from 10 pm to 1 am, is simulcast across all BBC Local Radio stations across England. During the station's downtime, BBC Radio WM simulcasts overnight programming from BBC Radio 5 Live

Notable presenters