1 “This is the end of the Home Service for today and for all days,” the continuity announcer David Dunhill informed listeners at 11.50pm on Friday, September 29, 1967. “So goodbye Home Service – two of the best words in the British language. We’re like a bride on the eve of her wedding – we go on being the same person, we hope, but we’ll never again have the same name.” The reborn service, now named Radio 4, came on the air without fanfare the following morning, with an edition of Farming Today.

2 In May 1988, an elderly woman from Blackpool, incensed that she was unable to receive Radio 4, shot a BBC commissionaire in the reception of Broadcasting House. The bullets were blanks.

3 Radio 4 is the second most popular BBC radio station after Radio 2, but costs three times as much to run – roughly £71 million a year. Fewer than 10 per cent of licence-fee-payers listen to Radio 4 every day.

4 The F-word was first uttered on the station by the film director Lindsay Anderson in 1970, to surprisingly few protests.

Apparently some things are worse than swearing: “I would gladly endure your hells, damns etc,” one letter-writer fumed, “if you would only master ‘who’ and ‘whom’.”

5 In 1978, the network’s move from medium wave to long wave was heralded in many homes by a knock on the door from a Boy Scout, who had instructions to retune each radio set and place a diamond-shaped sticker at 1500 LW on the dial. Twenty-two million stickers were distributed within a month.

6 Initially there were long-wave reception black spots in Oxford, Edinburgh and London – notoriously in Buckingham Palace, leading to one unspecified member of the royal family complaining in person to the BBC’s managing director of radio, Aubrey Singer.

7 Radio 4 had to fight for its life in the early 1980s, when proposals to transform it into a rolling news network gained strong support within the BBC. Naturally, it was the listeners themselves who finally saw off the idea when it became clear that The Archers and Gardeners’ Question Time were under threat. However, rolling news did come temporarily to R4 FM during the first Gulf War in 1991.

8 In May 1980, the nation was gripped by the Iranian embassy siege. At one stage the gunmen demanded that a message be broadcast on BBC radio, but since the Radio 4 schedule could not be interrupted, the statement was put out on Radio 2 instead. The gunmen, tuned to Radio 4, missed it.

9 The Today programme is Radio 4’s big ratings winner. It began life on the Home Service in 1957, when it took the form of an easygoing magazine show. Its news edge was gradually sharpened up until 1977, when the bizarre decision was made to cut it in two, with an interlude called Up to the Hourinserted between 7.35 and 8am. The programme was scrapped the following year, when Today took its present form.

10 In 1989, a retired vicar from Surrey bludgeoned his wife to death with a radio because he didn’t like the music on Desert Island Discs.

11 The proposed scrapping of long wave in 1992 led to one of the most famous listener revolts in the station’s history. The slogans at one demo summed up the less than foam-flecked mood. “What do we want?” they shouted. “Radio 4!” “Where do we want it?” “Long wave!” “And what do we say?” “Please!”

12 Many of the network’s best-loved shows predate Radio 4’s inception by decades. Desert Island Discs began in 1942, A Week in Westminster has been running since 1929, and Gardeners’ Question Time since 1947.

13 Listeners failed to save Fritz Spiegl’s early-morning UK Theme from being axed in 2006, but they have successfully campaigned for the preservation of Ronald Binge’s Sailing By, a soporific waltz broadcast late each night. Jarvis Cocker named it as one of his Desert Island Discs in 2005.

14 When the Archers omnibus was briefly moved from Sunday morning to Sunday evening in 1977, a disgruntled listener nailed a kipper and an abusive note to the door of the Controller’s son’s room at his Cambridge college.

15 The launch of the network’s first experiment with a phone-in format, It’s Your Linein 1970, was delayed for two months while the Post Office pondered the implications for its telephone exchange system.

16 Radio 4 listeners have never hesitated to display their bigotry. A 1972 phone-in focusing on the arrival in Britain of Asian refugees from Uganda attracted swaths of racist callers, and, as recently as last year, the network was bombarded with complaints about the continuity announcer Neil Nunes, who had the temerity to speak with a Jamaican accent.

17 In the late 1970s, the network – which had been broadcasting in stereo for a decade – dabbled briefly with quadraphonic sound. It was tried for some plays and The Archers before being dropped because no domestic radio sets could actually receive it.

18 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – one of Radio 4’s most spectacular comedy triumphs – nearly didn’t make it to air. When the producer Simon Brett played the first episode to the ageing Con Mahoney, the head of light entertainment, in 1978, Brett remembers that “not a single smile muscle twitched. At the end of it he turned to me and said, ‘ Is it funny?’ I said ‘Yes, I promise you it’s funny.’ ”

19 The furore surrounding Andrew Gilligan’s report on Today that the government had “sexed up” its Iraq dossier was one in a long line of bias rows that have battered Radio 4. Brian Redhead’s reign on Today was characterised by such frequent snipes against the Conservatives that Downing Street became positively paranoid, accusing him of making a coded attack on the privatisation of British Telecom in an aside about out-of-service emergency telephones on the M6.

20 The Shipping Forecast feels as if it’s been on Radio 4 for ever, but in fact transferred from Radio 2 in 1978. Its place on the airwaves is now preserved only by popular sentiment – technological advances have long since made it redundant as a source of information for sailors.

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