I can tell from the way you say “yoof” you are not part of the youth. And you are not in Britain either, so how can you speak for the British youth? As a 17 year old in Britain, I can tell you that I and many of my friends tune to Radio 1. I don’t listen to any other radio stations, because of the annoying advertisements they spew out, and because of the fact that they just play music.

Every DJ on Radio 1 has their own character to it. You say that Chris Moyles spewed out “putrid crap” for 25 minutes without playing a single record. Well, you probably tuned in for the first half hour of the show where they talk for half an hour until the 7 o’clock news. While you may consider it “putrid crap” you are not the “yoof”, so you cannot speak for the target audience. I and many other people enjoy listening to Moyles. Let me tell you, I don’t listen to Radio 1 for the music. While I like the type of music they play, if I want just music I’ll go to my iTunes playlist. I listen to it for the entertainment factor.

I challenge you to find a radio station that has a show like Scott Mills’, where they have daily features which take more than 5 minutes to produce. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find any other radio station that has a DJ who can produce a 40-50 minute podcast every day from a 3 hour show.

Tom Watson has hit the nail right on the head. Radio 1 is great because it isn’t commercial and doesn’t have to turn a profit at the end of the month. This means it can serve the interests of it’s listeners.

On a side-note, I am in two minds about Moyles. While I find him quite entertaining, as somebody already mentioned he has caused offence to people so many times in the past. He needs to tread carefully.

A central message that has emerged is that a medium like twitter or blogs can be used for very different purposes. So for e.g. #iranelection can sit quite happily alongside #RIPMichaelJackson, doing very different things but using the same tool.

Is it useful to separate radio in that way too? Unlike the internet, bandwith on the radio is relatively scarce, even with DAB. Is public interference in this market appropriate? Either way, its clear that Heart or GWR are doing something very different from Radio 1.

I’m a fan of PSB in general and support a publicly-funded BBC, but playing devil’s adviocate for a moment: If Radio 1 is valued at £100m, and you’re saying that this value comes from its PSB content, then wouldn’t a commerical owner maintain the same types of content in order to protect the brand, and its investment?

It caused me much distress and great political difficulty at the time – I was a Defence Minister at the MoD. Yet believe me when I tell you that Radio One gave their listeners a voice. No commercial radio station would have bothered to run the IED story, let alone dared to break it”

Why did the soldiers and their families not feel able to trust communicating their concerns to you or the other Defence Ministers or the senior MoD civil servants directly ?

Why are there no confidential “whistleblower”, or other lines of direct communication, available to them ?

You are seriously damaging your argument for keeping Radio 1 from being sold off, by using Chris Moyles as an example. He repeatedly causes genuine offence to lots of people with his insults e.g.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/3546650/BBC-DJ-Chris-Moyles-sparks-anger-by-appearing-to-suggest-Poles-made-good-prostitutes.html

But, you can find literally 1,000s on the Internet. From all over the world. And that’s precisely what ‘yoof’ does. Tunes in online. “Broadcast” radio is over. We don’t need DJs to filter our music anymore. We can choose.

I had the misfortune to listen to Chris Moyles the other day. He didn’t play 1 record for over 25 minutes. He just wittered on with his ‘crew’ talking inane, putrid crap. And for that you pay a licence fee? DJ = Disc Jockey, so play some fucking discs you fat twat. Or mp3s. Or something. But STOP FUCKING TALKING, SHIT HEAD.

Here in Madrid we have no exact equivalent to Radio 1. There’s RNE3, the state broadcaster’s ‘yoof channel’ but we don’t pay a licence fee so it’s not dominant. And yet, the choice on the FM dial here is better than in London. Although I choose to listen to Internet radio, when in the car I can go Radio Vallekas, Maxima FM, Antena 6, Europa FM, Kiss, MQM, Circulo, Marca, SER, Top Radio, Los 40, Onda and many others – all covering the Radio 1 demographic and providing a far wider range of music. Why such a large choice? ‘Cos there ain’t no Radio 1 equivalent squeezing the life out of the commercial sector, that’s why.

Radio 1′s time is up. It’s old and stale and about as exciting as pilchards. Let Britain move into the 21st century. Scrap it now.

Radio One gets the audience figures it does because it keeps itself fresh and on the ball, and it takes risks. I dread a commercial only media that plays it safe.