so looking at the radio shows available on my get iplayer, for some reason radio shows stopped updating a few weeks back, anyone else have that problem?

I refresh radio cache quite often, so I have no idea why it happened.
I get the failed to download last 7 days message when I refresh.

Any ideas?

Working fine for me on version 3.17.

You don't give enough info to allow anyone to suggest why you're having problems.

I understand from the postings here than a lot of you are coders or programmers and that's above my head.

How about this when I refresh cache>
WARNING: You have programmes over 30 days old that should be deleted.
WARNING: Find them with 'get_iplayer --history --before=720 ".*"'
WARNING: or use the 'Recordings' tab in the Web PVR Manager.
WARNING: Use 'get_iplayer --purge-files' to delete all programmes over 30 days old.
WARNING: Use 'get_iplayer --prefs-add --no-purge' to suppress this warning.

If I followed the above instructions, does this mean it would delete shows I have recorded? Or is this about freeing memory or something for the get iplayer search.

Sorry I don't really understand the how and why of the thing.

I'm sure get_iplayer can be confusing if you don't have a technical background

'get_iplayer --purge-files' will delete all programmes over 30 days old if they are still in your download folder - if you've moved them somewhere else, it won't. This is to comply with the BBC requirement that you don't keep programmes for more than 30 days.
To stop this warning ever appearing, use 'get_iplayer --prefs-add --no-purge'
You have to enter these instructions on the command line. If you don't know how to do that and you're using Windows then google "windows command line" or something similar - I can't help you here as I don't run get_iplayer on Windows, nor do I use the PVR.

All this has nothing to do with your cache not refreshing however.
I suggest you read https://forums.squarepenguin.co.uk/thread-655.html and https://forums.squarepenguin.co.uk/thread-706.html
At the very least, please say which version of get_iplayer you're using, how you're running it and any other errors/warning messages you're getting when you're attempting to refresh your cache.

Thank you for your help wheatear.
I would have talked myself into unintentionally deleting a lot of shows I've saved so a big thanks for preventing me from being stupid.