FOR a generation of children, they were the words that heralded 15 minutes of magic. “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.”

At its peak, Listen With Mother on the Light Programme (and later on BBC Radio 4) attracted an audience of more than a million children every day.

Today’s CBeebies generation, however, are not much into sitting comfortably, it seems: not for the 15 minutes or half an hour it would take to listen to a story on the radio, at least.

“Everything is very visual these days,” said York mum Jo Haywood, who has two children – Jack, aged ten, and Mia, five. “It is all to do with computer screens and CBeebies. I think it is difficult for them to come to terms with radio. To have to sit for half an hour and not be pressing buttons or something… I don’t think they’d know what to do with themselves.”

The BBC seems to be of the same opinion. The corporation has just announced that its last mainstream radio programme aimed at children – Go4it, which goes out after The Archers on Radio 4 on Sunday – is to be axed.

Children just aren’t listening to it, says Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer in his BBC blog.

The average age of the audience for Go4it is actually adults in their 50s, Mr Damazer said. “At one point RAJAR (the impartial body that measures radio audiences) indicated that more or less no children at all were tuning in.”

Jo can believe that. “I used to listen to Go4it in the bath,” she said. “But I don’t think the kids have ever, ever listened to it.”

So has children’s radio had its day? Do youngsters today simply not have the patience or the attention span to sit and listen?

Jo thinks so. Her son Jack is a huge Dr Who fan, she says. “But I can’t get him to listen to the Dr Who series on digital radio.”

Mr Damazer clearly agrees. There will continue to be some children’s radio on digital BBC7, he said. But while there is “certainly life with podcasts and CDs, the fact is that it is incredibly hard for linear listening to find an audience with children,” he told a national newspaper.

York-based TV consultant Chris Wood doesn’t accept that argument. Chris grew up listening to the likes of Tony Hancock on the radio. And he believes there should still be a place for radio in children’s lives.

He has nothing against TV. He runs his own independent TV production company, and once worked on children’s programmes such as Playaway.

But radio has huge power to stimulate the imagination, in a way that TV cannot, he said. “A good radio programme is something that grips the imagination. You fill in the details as you listen – what the clothes are, where the story is going. You experience the places in your mind.”

That is true of adults, and it is even more true of children, Chris said. “They are even more open to this. If you give them triggers, their imaginations will fill in the details. TV by definition defines what you are looking at. Radio doesn’t. You can imagine what you want to.

“It has to be part of the BBC remit to do that: to trigger the ability to imagine.”

His own 18-year-old daughter is typical of a teenage generation with a low boredom threshold, for whom everything has to be instant. “She sits in front of MTV, and if she doesn’t like it she is on the remote and can whiz through as many as 25 channels in half a minute.”

But that doesn’t mean the BBC should give up on children’s radio: it should try harder. Children make up perhaps 20 per cent of the potential BBC radio audience. “It is absolutely inexplicable that they are giving up.”

Pickering-based scriptwriter Neil Raphael tends to agree.

He grew up listening to Uncle Mac on Children’s Favourites in the 1950s, and then listening spellbound to the likes of Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan and Jon Pertwee on the radio.

They kick-started his imagination, and made him fall in love with writing. And if the BBC gives up on children’s radio, he fears children will miss out.

Go4it wasn’t the greatest radio show ever, he agreed. “But they should have persevered with something stronger.”

His own three daughters, aged nine to 14, don’t listen to the radio, even though there are radios all around the house. With the internet, iPods, computers, and podcasts there is so much more for children to do today. But the BBC shouldn’t give up.

“Children are the listeners of the future, the writers of the future, the producers and script-writers of the future.”

Jo doesn’t agree. Her son Jack is happy to listen to the football on Radio 5 Live. “I think a lot of boys do.” But radio especially for children? It has probably had its day.

“I think it is one of those things that adults would like to see – the sort of people who want to be sitting down and listening with mother.

“But for modern children it is just not part of their world any more.”

Children’s radio classics...

Children’s Hour: The wartime children’s favourite, it was actually broadcast from 1922 to 1964. It was hugely popular, and made actors and presenters such as Arthur Burrows, Violet Carson, Wilfred Pickles and Jon Pertwee national figures. Popular series which ran on Children’s Hour included Jennings At School, Just So Stories, Toytown, Sherlock Holmes and Winnie Tthe Pooh.

Listen With Mother: Every weekday afternoon at 1.45pm on the Light Programme, before Woman’s Hour between 1950 and 1982. Introduced every day with the immortal lines: “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin” it was a mixture of stories, songs and nursery rhymes for children under five.

Children’s Favourites: A music request show for children, which first ran on the Light Programme in 1954, on Saturday mornings. In the early years it was presented by Derek McCulloch – radio’s Uncle Mac. Until the mid-1960s the signature tune was Puffin’ Billy. In the late 1960s, the show was renamed Junior Choice. The title Junior Choice was dropped in 1982, but the programme continued until 1984 as Tony Blackburn’s Saturday Show and Tony Blackburn’s Sunday Show.