Words aren't the only tools that you can use to tell a story. Numbers have as much narrative power. A History of Britain In Numbers interrogates data to reveal the changes that have swept through our nation and created the Britain that we live in today.

From rotten teeth to toilet arrangements to austerity, here are some surprising stats unveiled by the team.

Homes

The 1861 census records that in Dundee there were about 90,000 people… and three WCs. Two of them in hotels.   

Health

Of every 100 deaths in 1840, nearly half were children.

Of every 100 today, about 1 is.  

In a survey in 1968, nearly four in ten of those aged over 16 had NO natural teeth. 

Income

To get an idea of how much lower incomes were just before the first world war, do this simple sum:

Take your current income, leave prices overall as they are, and then cut your income by 80%.

So if you are earning £30,000, imagine how you’d get by on £6,000.

Stuff

By one estimate, the same amount of artificial lighting in the year 1300, cost about twenty thousand times more than it would today (relative to income).

At the Redbridge recycling depot in Oxford ten years ago, they used to collect about 100 tonnes a year and it's now about 1,000 tonnes a year.

Population

Imagine 10 people in a room, 6 adults and 4 children. This was Britain in 1840.

Now change it to 8 adults and 2 children. This is Britain today.

Work

The number of fatal accidents at work has declined in the past century by about 97% despite a near-doubling of the population.

Women

A woman’s chance of going to university in the 1920s was about 1/3 of a man’s.

Today it is 30% higher than a man’s.

A woman today has about 100 times the chance of obtaining a degree as her great grandmother.

 Old age

At the beginning of the 20^th century about 1 per cent of households were someone living alone. Today it’s about a third.

It’s been estimated that about half of those aged 75 or older live alone.

Listen to A  History of Britain In Numbers

Download the podcast

"And, this week, that train of thought led us to try to squeeze as many Radio 4 presenters and producers
into our studio as possible..."

A bunch of attention seekers would be one way of describing the More or Less team.

With the Financial Times' Undercover Economist Tim Harford at the helm, we go to great lengths to get listeners to tune in to chat about statistics. They can be revealing, surprising, unexpected and, of course, confusing, contradictory or plain bogus.

But on More or Less, we aim to provide a clear way through the numbers of the moment.

And, this week, that train of thought led us to try to squeeze as many Radio 4 presenters and producers into our studio as possible.

With the UN recently announcing that the world's population had grown to 7bn, we thought there was no time like the present to test the popular belief that you could fit everyone in the world on the Isle of Wight (people really do believe this, and have done for a long time - type it into your search engine), if they stood shoulder to shoulder.

If we could fit about 74 people into our studio, we calculated, then the whole world could move to the Isle of Wight. If it so wished.

Measuring just 4m², once you take away the furniture, our studio's modelled in the finest BBC broom cupboard tradition.

It wasn't immediately clear it was advisable to stuff it full of human beings. But we did. (We consulted a BBC health and safety adviser - and persuaded him to squeeze in too).

We had strict rules - keep your hands to yourself and you're only allowed in if you've deodorised. Money Box presenter Paul Lewis was first through the door, followed - if you'll believe us - by dozens of his production staff. Other Radio 4 presenters appeared, rallying round to help the programme. And it was a tight fit.

"Oh, I can't get in there!" Jim Naughtie was heard to exclaim, while Gerry Northam sat on Winifred Robinson's knee. Tim was in charge of the counting, partly because he is good with numbers but mainly because he's really tall.

Meanwhile I, as producers always are, was in charge of worrying that something might go wrong.

You'll have to listen to find out how many we squashed in and how many of the big name presenters were really there. Suffice to say, I was quite surprised. And a bit hot.

Ruth Alexander is series producer, More or Less, BBC Radio 4

• More or Less is back on air with a new series on Friday 2 December 2011 at the new time of 1630 GMT. It is repeated on Sunday evenings at 2000 GMT. And the international More or Less podcast is available for download.

http://www.rajar.co.uk/listening/quarterly_listening.php

Yesterday on my way out of Broadcasting House to have lunch with Libby Purves, I met George Soros in the lift - he had just been a guest on Stephanie Flanders' new series Stephanomics. Before I left the office I listened back to Umberto Eco (what a voice; what books) interviewed for Front Row with Kirsty Lang.

Midweek included Terry Wogan (and he sang); last week Michael Morpurgo told Libby that he first got to see his real father on TV playing Magwitch in Great Expectations; and the week before featured a hero of mine (and Libby's it turns out), Albie Sachs, the former high-court judge and an architect of the South African constitution.

Oh, and if you haven't heard them already, don't miss Stephen Fry and Daniel Digby as Marengo and Copenhagen - the war horses of Napoleon and Wellington - in Warhorses of Letters which started this week.

Our Rajar figures are 10.55m - up by some 187k when compared with last year, although down on last quarter's record of 10.85m. It's worth noting that this quarter includes the summer hols in which listening often dips. Share is 12 per cent - up slightly compared with this time last year when it was 11.8 per cent, but again down on last quarter which was 12.4 per cent (share is about the share of listening to all radio that Radio 4 enjoys).

The average hours that listeners spend tuned to Radio 4 each week is up a tad this quarter and up some 19 minutes on the year at 12 hours and 17 minutes.

So on average ten and a half million people listen to Radio 4 for over twelve hours a week.

Oh and a small record or two - for Woman's Hour Drama, the Afternoon Play, as well as You and Yours - and FOOC on Saturday has done particularly well.

Radio 4 Extra's reach is much the same as last quarter at 1.52m (it was 1.53m). It is significantly higher than last year - up 46 per cent. Share is a record 0.9 per cent and total hours spent with the station each week hit a record of 9 million+, thanks to average time spent per listener of just over 6 hours. We hope this means that listeners have now found some programmes they enjoy on Radio 4 Extra and are staying with us to listen to them.

Congratulations to everyone who has contributed to the last three months of programmes.

Our audience guru, Alison Winter, tells me that on Radio 4 and 4 Extra we are seeing a pattern of long term growth. She said she would add a few lines to this note from me for those who might prefer to go to the tutored source as it were.

Alison Winter writes:

"You may recall seeing the headlines 3 months ago when Radio 4 enjoyed a record audience of 10.85m, riding on the tide of good news for radio that saw more people (47.6m, 15+) listening to more radio (just over 1 billion hours every week) than ever before.

So, as we pondered what the results for Q3 might have in store we expected to see a decline, given that Q3 includes the summer months of July and August, when normal routines can be disrupted and people are apt to spend more time out of the home and workplace. And indeed most radio stations have seen declines on the quarter, Radio 4 being no exception. But there is also a pattern of longterm growth as audiences are, by and large, higher than they were a year ago. In the case of Radio 4, the weekly audience has remained above 10 million (with only one exception) since mid-way through 2009, routinely attracting 1 in 5 of the UK population every week.

Gwyn has already highlighted some of the particularly good performances across the network this time round but another one I've found is the relative strength of DAB as a listening platform among Radio 4 listeners: as much as 26% of all Radio 4 listening is through DAB, versus the industry average of 18%. Maybe this explains the good news for 4 Extra, maintaining almost all of those who tuned in last quarter as it launched, and reaching record hours of listening each week."

Gwyneth Williams is Controller of BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 4 Extra

• You can read the press release (PDF) and view the Q3 2011 quarterly summary on the RAJAR website.
• From BBC Press Office: RAJAR - BBC Radio listening highest for three years
• BBC News: BBC Radio 4 audience falls from record listenership
• The Drum: Rajars reveal that digital radio accounts for nearly a third of all listening figures
• RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) is jointly owned by the BBC and commercial radio trade body the Radio Centre. Participating listeners are asked to record their radio listening in quarter-hour time blocks for one week.
• Picture, 28 January 2009, by Adam Bowie, used under licence.

I am on holiday in Wales (glorious river noise, mountains and sun) and keep having to go up the drive to use the Blackberry so I had given our audience guru, Alison Winter, the land line to find me instantly with her quarterly much-awaited phone call bearing RAJAR data - RAJAR is the body that calculates and releases the official radio listening figures every quarter.

Sure enough - and right on the expected time - her expert tones delivered rather good news: new records all round for Radio 4 and 4 Extra. A record across all genres: news, drama and comedy.

Congratulations to brilliant programme-makers everywhere for this audience appreciation of your work. News records include Today, the World at One (which I am about to extend in length), PM and the Six O'clock bulletin. Eighty-seven per cent of Radio 4 listeners listen to some of our news output on a weekly basis. This is heartening.

I am most pleased, however, this time, with the Radio 4 Extra record of 1.6 million. This demonstrates that listeners are responding to the rich archive and additional programmes seductively put together by my colleague, Mary Kalemkerian, Radio 4 Extra's Head of Programmes, and her team.

And now, pay particular attention to the words of the audience research guru Alison Winter. Here she is to explain all:

Always good to be the bearer of good news and this quarter gave me that very opportunity. It was with some trepidation, though, that I opened the file detailing the latest radio listening figures, mindful of the "best ever" figures we reported last time round.

But these figures have surpassed them. 10.85m UK adults now listen to Radio 4 each week, nudging up from 10.83 last quarter and a good deal up from the figure we reported at this time last year, 10.4m. And Radio 4 listeners are incredibly loyal to the station too, tuning in for, on average, 12h 15m every week - an exceptional figure among those stations that broadcast to the whole of the UK.

As Gwyn points out above, this isn't the work of one or two programmes or even one particular genre. It's thanks to strong content across the board. In addition to the programmes already mentioned, Front Row, The Archers, Woman's Hour and You and Yours are examples of programmes that will be celebrating record figures today. Breakfast is a key time for radio listening and our own Today goes from strength to strength too, this time attracting 7.18m weekly listeners.

Speaking of audience, again we find increases across the board this time round: Radio 4 continues to do an admirable job of attracting both men and women in almost equal measure, and there are increases in the number of listeners across different ages.

And of course this was the first quarter that we saw figures for the newly-relaunched Radio 4 Extra, which is now the most listened to digital-only network.

The 1.6m figure mentioned above is up from 1.16m last quarter and, together with the record Radio 4 figure, points to a healthy appetite for speech radio of this kind.

Finally, to put all of this in context, we know, today, that more people than ever before are listening to the radio in the UK - 47.62 million of us to be exact. And we're listening for longer than ever, consuming over 1 billion hours of live radio every week.

So while there's good news for Radio 4, Radio 4 Extra and their listeners, the wider story is also of a radio sector that's still relevant and actually going from strength to strength.

Gwyneth Williams is Controller of BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 4 Extra

• You can read the press release (PDF) and view the Q2 2011 quarterly summary on the RAJAR website.
• RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) is jointly owned by the BBC and commercial radio trade body the Radio Centre. Participating listeners are asked to record their radio listening in quarter-hour time blocks for one week.
• Picture, 28 January 2009, by Adam Bowie, used under licence.

http://www.rajar.co.uk/listening/quarterly_listening.php

"Rather fabulous" - she really did say that a moment ago on the phone. I am referring to our Radio 4 audience guru, Alison Winter. It was a momentary lapse as she is, as you might expect when it comes to figures, well... measured... Thus you will gather that the first quarter RAJAR listening figures for Radio 4 are cheering: a record reach in fact of 10.8 million. This means that 10.8 million people have listened to Radio 4 for at least five minutes a week in the last three months. This time last year the figure was 10 million. So congratulations to all programme-makers.

The previous all-time highest reach of 10.4 million was in the second quarter last year. Our best guess then was that this was because of the general election and the interest that generated. There has been no general election this time so it could be that once those listeners found us we managed somehow to hang onto them. Perhaps instead they have become entranced with the Arab Spring and our coverage of the Middle East... Or perhaps they just love John Humphrys - reach to the Today programme was a record 7.03million.

Share for Radio 4 too is slightly up at 12.3 per cent which makes it broadly consistent with last year when it was 12.2 per cent. (Share is the proportion of all listening to all radio in the UK) I find this heartening as it means that people are continuing to listen to Radio 4 for rather a considerable length of time- in fact they listen for around twelve hours a week. Given the explosion of choice in the media and the seemingly relentless demands on our time this commitment from our audience feels significant and privileged.

Among specific audience groups, we now have more women listening to Radio 4 than ever before - 5.49 million every week (vs. just under 5.34 million men). There are high figures among our core, very loyal, older audiences but at the same time we have more under-35s listening to Radio 4 than at any point since 2003.

And then there is Radio 7, now transformed into Radio 4 Extra. Weekly reach there too is a record 1.159 million. These record figures are in tune with the trend for radio which is something to celebrate but my personal view is that the greatest value they bring is to give all of us at Radio 4 the confidence to set them aside and concentrate on making the best programmes we can for our cherished and discerning audience.

UPDATE 2pm, May 12th: I have more news on this record quarter - and all credit to Radio 4's production teams. We have record listening figures for the following: comedy programmes across the week (5.22 million), our drama throughout the week (7.1 million), The Archers (2.49 million for lunchtime listening and 5.01million across the week); You and Yours with 3.33 million - and along with her Sony Gold Special Award, Jenni Murray and the Womans Hour team can celebrate a record listening figure of 3.56million across the week.

Gwyneth Williams is Controller of BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 4 Extra

• RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) is jointly owned by the BBC and commercial radio trade body the Radio Centre. Participating listeners are asked to record their radio listening in quarter-hour time blocks for one week.
• The RAJAR figures for 'linear listening', not including on-demand listening or podcasts, in a table.
• Read 5 Live Controller; Adrian Van Klaveren's analysis of his network's figures..
• Read the BBC's press release and download the official RAJAR quarterly press release (PDF).
• Picture, 28 January 2009, by Adam Bowie, used under licence.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9441000/9441022.stm

The census is all well and good. (Unless you think it a gross violation of your privacy, of course, or a colossal waste of public money - as a programme about statistics, however, we on More or Less quite like it).

It will tell us how many we are, where we live, with whom, and more. Good, hard facts. But, we wondered, could we yield some surprising data by asking less obvious questions? Are we, for example, a selfish lot? Are we lonely? Do we think we have a better or worse quality of life than our parents had when they were our age?

The Government is increasingly interested in this softer stuff. The Office for National Statistics is developing a wellbeing index and will include questions on 'life satisfaction' in next month's household survey. Some hope a wellbeing index might one day rival GDP as a measure of national progress.

But there are no such questions in the 2011 census. That's why we have created our own.

While the ONS had 10 years and £482 million to throw at their census, we had a few days and no money to throw at ours. So we are not sampling the nation, but the Today and More or Less audiences. Even then, we're only sampling those who decide to fill in the form.

We will have to treat our findings with appropriate caution. But we do have some statistical tricks up our sleeve which - we hope - will allow us to discern something of interest. We are grateful to Peter Lynn, a professor of survey methodology at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University, for designing the questions with us.

The Other Census is open for two weeks from April 1. Tim Harford will present the results on Today and More or Less on April 22.

Richard Knight is Series Editor of More or Less

• Listen to the first in the new series of More or Less on BBC Radio 4 at 1330 today and sign up for the free podcast.
• Complete the More or Less other census on the Today web site.
• There's a press release about the Household Survey on the ONS web site (PDF).
• Peter Lynn's homepage on the University of Essex web site.
• Picture by Aditya. Some rights reserved.

Editor's note: Radio 4's listening figures for the final quarter of 2010 are published tomorrow. Paul Kennedy, Research Director at RAJAR, explains how they're gathered - SB.

RAJAR, or 'Radio Joint Audience Research', is the official body in charge of radio audience measurement for the UK. RAJAR was established in 1992 to replace two other measurement systems operated separately by the BBC and Commercial Radio. Today RAJAR collects information on behalf of over 300 stations, ranging from very small local services to the national networks...

Read the rest of Paul's primer and leave a comment, on the BBC Radio blog.

http://www.rajar.co.uk/listening/quarterly_listening.php

I missed the much-discussed phonecall yesterday about the three-monthly Rajar figures so I went looking for Alison Winter, the Radio 4 audiences guru. We found a quiet corner and whispered the headlines to and fro. It's all rather good - actually I think very good.  So congratulations to the programme-makers and to Mark Damazer.  Radio 4 reach this quarter is 10.37 million. That means that 10.37 million people have listened to Radio 4 for at least 15 minutes a week in the last three months.

Last quarter Radio 4 got its highest figures ever - and our best guess is that that is because of the general election and the interest it generated. Those figures for our all-time highest reach were 10.40 million - so this quarter compares rather well. Now it could be that people are still fascinated by politics, but we might reach towards the more appealing notion that perhaps we have managed to retain some of the new listeners we drew in; let's hope we continue to hang onto them. The rather lower share figure might bear this out. Share is the proportion of all listening to all radio in the UK.

And that measure for Radio 4 this quarter is 11.9 per cent. This time last year it was 12.4 per cent. Down, slightly, in this case because, overall, people are listening for a marginally shorter length of time to Radio 4. It could be then, taking the positive view, that we have retained new listeners and that these new listeners still need to be persuaded to listen longer...  Today continues to attract a very large audience to Radio 4 - just over 6.5million every week (Mon-Fri) - and drama too is up this quarter on last. 

Among specific audience groups, we now have more men listening to Radio 4 than ever before - 5.4 million every week (vs. just under 5 million women).  There are also record figures among our core, very loyal, older audiences but at the same time we have more under 35s listening to Radio 4 than at any point since 1999.

And then there is Radio 7. Weekly reach is the second largest ever at 1.045 million.

So a cheery first Rajar experience for me. Please will Tim Harford, from More or Less- a Radio 4 programme launched (I am proud to say) while I was Head of Radio Current Affairs, now tell me what I have got wrong. And what it all really means. Watch this space...

Gwyneth Williams is Controller of BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 7.

• RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) is jointly owned by the BBC and commercial radio trade body the Radio Centre. Participating listeners are asked to record their radio listening in quarter-hour time blocks for one week.
• The RAJAR figures for 'linear listening', not including on-demand listening or podcasts, in a table and the official quarterly press release (PDF).
• The Controller of BBC Radio 5 Live; Adrian Van Klaveren has also blogged about his station's figures.
• "RAJAR 2010 Quarter 3: BBC Proms boosts Radio 3 by 300,000: BBC Press Release
• Picture, 28 January 2009, by Adam Bowie, used under licence.

We're nearly there - less than a week to go - but the More or Less election team still needs your help.

Our job is to explain the numbers being thrown around by all candidates during the campaign. Our presenter (and the FT's Undercover Economist) Tim Harford is broadcasting our analysis on PM and Today. You can find an archive of our work so far on the More or Less web site.

It's been fun. But after weeks of going line-by-line through speeches, combing data-sets and finding functions on our calculators we didn't know existed, we're getting tired.

So here's how you can help: if you spot what you suspect is a rogue statistic - or simply a confusing one - please contact us at moreorless@bbc.co.uk.

What sort of thing should you be looking for? Here's an example which caught our eye on Wednesday.

This is Sarah Montague and David Miliband on Today:

DM: The biggest complaint the IFS have is that we haven't had a spending review, a detailed spending review. And the second biggest complaint is that we haven't set out plans up to 2016 and 2017, i.e. into the Parliament after next. When it comes to the four years... br>SM: They say £44 billion of cuts remain undefined in Labour's plans... br>DM: For 2016, 2017.

We nearly choked on our morning croissants when we heard that one. You can see here (PDF) that the well-respected think-tank the IFS were perfectly clear: they say £44 billion of 'mystery' cuts - cuts Labour has so far failed to specify - will need to be made by 2014/15. (The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, incidentally, have similar black holes on their plans).

During the final PM's debate Nick Clegg said "80% of people who come into this country come from the European Union" - and therefore, in his view, it was dishonest of David Cameron to suggest there could be a meaningful cap on immigration.

But that 80% figure is wrong. Actually, it's about a third. On Friday morning Vince Cable, speaking on Today, said his leader was referring not to all immigrants, but to 'workers'. The Lib Dem press office pointed us to their source, an article in The Economist which included the following claim: "Workers from outside the EU make up just one-fifth of all immigrants when students (who pay valuable tuition fees) are excluded".

As my colleague Oliver Hawkins has discovered, however, the fact that one-fifth of all immigrants are workers from outside the EU does not prove that the remaining four fifths of all immigrants are workers from inside the EU.

What about other types of immigrants, like dependents?

In fact, ONS data show that of all the people who come to the UK to work - who aren't British citizens - 60% come from the EU.

In the same debate David Cameron claimed that Gordon Brown had got his facts wrong on the Conservative proposals to cut child-tax credits: he said they would only be taken away from families earning over £50,000.

As our colleague Stephanie Flanders has pointed out, however, the IFS has called that description of the proposal "incomplete at best and misleading at worst".

All families with an income over £40,000 would lose some of their tax credits (and most families earning over £48,175, who get tax credits now, would lose all of them).

It seems, even at this late stage in the campaign, we need to keep our eyes open. If you can help, please do.

Richard Knight is series producer of More or Less

• More or Less is off-air at the moment but you can hear Tim Harford's Electionwatch on Today and PM until the election.
• Picture by Lenore Edman. Used under licence.

I went to the recording of The Now Show last Thursday night - the last of the current run. It's recorded at the Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House. Free - and a very jolly evening can be had. The News Quiz also records there - as do a lot of other BBC shows. Click here to find out how to get tickets. In the previous week's podcast (but not on air) the team asked listeners outside the UK to email with their (personal) big news. We got a lot back - and used some of it in this week's show. I am indebted to the producer - Ed Morrish - for the geographical breakdown.

• When The Now Show asked for news from listeners around the world, 621 podcast subscribers replied, from 72 different countries. The most remote was South Georgia (lumped together with the Falklands on the map) and furthest away Stewart Island, New Zealand, 11,828 miles from the Radio Theatre.
• We used Many Eyes to visualise the geographic data. The visualisation is here and the raw data here (CSV file). Many Eyes doesn't recognise Antarctica, Easter Island, South Georgia or Tibet as separate countries, although listeners from all four emailed the programme).
• The Now Show is off-air at the moment but you can still listen to the most recent episode and subscribe to Radio 4's Friday Night Comedy podcast.

http://www.rajar.co.uk/listening/quarterly_listening.php

It's a RAJAR day - when the radio industry gets its audience figures.

I must stress that RAJARs are not the be all and end all of matters. Quality, range, impact - all count a great deal. But still - I'd rather they were good than not. And they are.

We appear to be increasing quarter-on-quarter in microscopic increments - from 9.98 million reach to 9.999. (Reach is defined as the number of people who listen to at least 15 minutes a week). I left here last night uncertain about the theological decency of rounding this up to 10 million. I am told that this is indeed considered to be 10 million. Hooray.

Share - is a little down quarter-on-quarter - from 12.5% to 12.1% but is still very satisfactory. The average amount of listening per listener is over 12 hours, the most for any BBC network.

I am not quite sure why we are having such a good RAJAR year. The likeliest answer is the strength of the economic story. R4 did very well early in 2003 when the war with Iraq was happening and also in the quarter of 9/11 so maybe it's that.

What is clear (to me at any rate) is the strength and depth of R4's coverage of this sort of serious story - and of MPs expenses where we put together some very strong programmes - peppered with exclusive interviews. It was The World at One that had Anthony Steen's extraordinary outburst - and The Report had the first interview from within the House of Commons fees office. Nick Robinson's programme - featuring the first broadcast interview with The Telegraph's editor Will Lewis - gave a terrific insight into the dilemmas of reporting the story.

And meanwhile - there' s been Smiley (the brainchild of Patrick Rayner in BBC Scotland Drama), Inside the Ethics Committee - one of my favourite factual treats - drama meets ethics - which is on at the moment. And The Odd Half Hour last night at 1830 - and so on.

The best bit of this job is listening to the programmes.

• RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) is jointly owned by the BBC and commercial radio trade body the Radio Centre. Participating listeners are asked to record their radio listening in quarter-hour time blocks for one week.
• The RAJAR figures for 'linear listening', not including on-demand listening or podcasts, in a table and the official quarterly press release (PDF).
• The BBC's RAJAR press release.
• Trade paper Radio Today leads on the RAJARs.
• Media Guardian has a 'who said what' feature on industry reaction to the latest figures.
• Wikipedia's entries on RAJAR and on audience share.
• Picture, Any Questions, Friday Evening, by Tristan Ferne. Used under licence.

http://www.rajar.co.uk/listening/quarterly_listening.php

The RAJAR figures are a ritual.

Once every three months R4's Head of Audience Research (he does many other things too) phones up on a Wednesday evening and reels off a few key numbers for Radio 4 and Radio 7. The conversation lasts about 30 seconds - and we are both exaggeratedly laconic. Yesterday he began with "Quite good really" or words to that effect and then went on to say... "9.98million/12.5%/6.69 million/PM all-time high/everything up/Radio 7 984,000."

I said "That's OK then. And if we indulge ourselves by musing about rounding up to the next significant figure we get to 10 million for Radio 4... but we must not cheat." End of conversation.

I will decode - and all of what follows applies to the first three months of 2009.

9.98 million people per week listened to Radio 4 for at least 15 minutes per week. (This figure is called 'Weekly Reach'). This figure has been exceeded only once in the last ten years or so - during the Iraq war in 2003.

The average amount of listening per week of those 9.98 million is 12 hours and 50 minutes.(Radio 4 has the highest average weekly listening figure of the national stations). Radio 4 listening now accounts for 12.5% of all listening to all radio in the U.K - the highest figure since the current measuring system for radio listening was introduced over a decade ago.

Weekly Reach for Today is 6.69 million. That too is a very high figure and when Today's figures are strong it helps the overall R4 figure. PM's figures - 3.84 million and a 15.1% share - have never been better - or at least not since the new measurement system was introduced.

But it was not just News programmes that did well this quarter. Drama and Comedy for instance had a bumper quarter too. And Radio 7's weekly reach was its best yet at 984,000.

But - and it's a very big but indeed - RAJAR figures - whether up, down or sideways - do not tell the whole story about Radio 4 or Radio 7. Quality, range, distinctiveness, originality all matter and are not always reflected in the RAJAR figures. I remember one quarter a couple of years back where I thought we had transmitted some really outstanding programmes but the RAJAR figures were not particularly noteworthy. And - painful though it may be to admit - the reverse is also possible. But I hope not in this case.

The radio industry, unlike television (BARB) does not have overnight figures. Occasionally one yearns for evidence that a particular programme or piece of scheduling has reaped rewards - but on the whole the absence of the 'overnights' is a liberation. You can put in a greater number of 90 minute plays on Saturday afternoons - for instance - without instantly fretting about the impact on a particular Saturday afternoon's listening. One day the technology may allow for overnights in radio - and I can't deny that I would be reading them voraciously - but for the time being I enjoy not having them.

So it's been a good RAJAR quarter and I hope we have been delighting and stimulating you - but I am acutely aware that what goes up can come down - so we won't be spending the day awash with champagne.

• RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) is jointly owned by the BBC and commercial radio trade body the Radio Centre. Participating listeners are asked to record their radio listening in quarter-hour time blocks for one week.
• The RAJAR figures for 'linear listening', not including on-demand listening or podcasts, in a table and the official quarterly press release (PDF).
• The BBC's RAJAR press release leads on Radio 4's record quarter.
• BBC News Online covered the RAJARs, leading on Chris Moyles.
• Trade paper Radio Today's RAJAR page.
• Media Guardian on the RAJARs.
• Paid Content, a digital media trade paper, on Internet listening
• Journalism trade paper Press Gazette emphasises Radio 4's performance.
• Wikipedia's entry on RAJAR.