P1 Morgen marks 25 years after church opposed its launch

P1 Morgen is marking 25 years on air after facing opposition from the church, politicians and parts of DR when it replaced morning religious programming and classical music, DR reports.

The programme has broadcast three hours of live radio every weekday from 6am to 9am since its launch. It has also broadcast live for one or more hours on some weekends.

DR first aired P1 Morgen on September 3, 2001. Karen Secher, then a host on P1, entered a studio in the former radio house on Rosenørns Allé with a printed script.

“I was so nervous,” Secher recalled on P1 Morgen. She said careful preparation was the reason she did not vomit in front of the microphone during the first broadcast. Secher now makes Parnasset on K-live.

Opposition from the church

Before P1 Morgen launched, the morning schedule had been occupied by church content and classical music for decades. The change prompted protests, particularly from the church.

The day after the first broadcast, Kristeligt Dagblad published a lukewarm review asking who had made what it called a “reckless decision” to remove the daily morning service.

Leif Lønsmann, who was DR’s radio director from 1998 to 2008, was among those involved in creating P1 Morgen.

“Out of DR’s 3,000 employees, perhaps five to seven of us thought it was a really good idea when we started,” he said. “So happy birthday. You were truly born in opposition and after many years of labour.”

The programme was created through a series of compromises. For its first five years, each broadcast included a small religious segment called “At the beginning of the day”, in which a priest reflected on life. The segment was removed in 2006.

Nearly 300,000 daily listeners

P1 Morgen now has an average of 295,000 daily listeners on weekdays between 6am and 9am. Just over 100,000 people listen at the same time between about 7.30am and 9am, a period known as the peak. The largest peak comes at 8am.

To mark the anniversary, P1 Morgen opened an SMS thread during Thursday’s broadcast, inviting listeners to send praise and criticism. More than 400 messages had arrived during the morning.

Many listeners said the programme was much-loved and a fixed part of their morning routine, often during their commute to work.

Listener Eva Høegh said the programme generally covers “relevant and important topics and treats them sensibly”. But she criticised its use of language, saying the hosts did not sufficiently recognise that they were role models.

She said incorrect word forms or usage on live radio could annoy her enough to switch the programme off. However, she turns the radio on again the next morning and gives P1 Morgen another chance.

A vision that remains

After 25 years, around 6,500 P1 Morgen broadcasts have been aired, amounting to tens of thousands of hours of morning radio.

The programme has changed considerably since its launch. Today, it consists almost entirely of live segments, with a strong focus on current events and the day’s news. Journalists, hosts and editors arrive each day to prepare the broadcast.

When Lønsmann helped create P1 Morgen, the internet was not yet a major mass medium. The programme’s original vision was to become a “paperless morning newspaper”, or an electronic morning newspaper.

The idea was to help people with busy mornings feel up to date when they arrived at work without having to turn on the television, go online or read a newspaper. Lønsmann said the programme still fulfils that vision.