Liza Tarbuck has left her Radio 2 Saturday evening show after 14 years, ending a run that sat at the centre of Celebrity Pottery Throw Down 2026 coverage around her next move. Her final edition aired in January, and by March she had used Instagram to tell listeners she had gone.
The numbers explain why this was more than a routine schedule shift: the programme drew 2 million listeners and was pulling 50 messages per minute. Tarbuck said she had been at Radio 2 on and off for 36 years in total, and described the departure as the point where she realised it was time to go.
Liza Tarbuck and 2 million listeners
Tarbuck’s own description of the show helps explain the scale of what Radio 2 has lost. She said, "For two hours every weekend, we were a proper gang," and added, "Together we made two hours of radio feel like a private members’ club." That kind of listener loyalty is hard to replace quickly, especially when a programme is already doing 2 million and generating 50 messages a minute.
Her farewell also carried a plain commercial truth: audiences do not follow a presenter for 14 years by accident. Tarbuck said, "I miss angsting over the playlist," which is the sort of detail that tells you the show was built on constant listener judgment, not passive background listening. When she said, "That’s the stuff of dreams," she was talking about the mix of volume and intimacy that made the slot unusually sticky.
Radio 2 and the exit pattern
The departure lands in the middle of a wider pattern at Radio 2, where Tarbuck said, "The talent leaving Radio 2 tells its own story." She also argued, "The needs high standards and a certain level of curation because it’s a world leader," before adding, "But you can’t live off that reputation for ever."
That is the friction in the story: Tarbuck framed her exit as personal, saying she realised it was time to go, while also pointing to the broader drain of familiar voices from Radio 2. In other words, this was not just one presenter deciding to step aside; it also sits inside a station-wide test of whether big audiences can be held together without the same old names.
Instagram and the farewell
March was the point at which the move became public, after Tarbuck posted a farewell message on Instagram. In that message she wrote, "I think you’ve guessed," followed by, "Some fool left a door open and I sneaked out." She then summed it up with, "A French exit."
She also told listeners, "Thank you for letting me in, it’s been a privilege." That reads less like a clean handover than a deliberately quiet departure from a show that had become a fixture. What Tarbuck does next is still the live question, but the cleaner read is that she has already closed the Radio 2 chapter on her own terms.
