Radio 1 makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon

Over the past year or so I have worked in offices with the relaxed policy of allowing us to conduct our menial tasks to the background of radio. Fair enough you may think, but as with any medium of culture, many otherwise sane and reasonable people tend to default to whatever mainstream shite is put under their noses. In this case I mean Radio 1 with all of its inherent horrors.

I mean, please tell me why they must play the same songs endlessly? I don’t expect any radio station to cater exactly to my taste, but at least play varied garbage instead of the same hourly abominations – I’m thinking of Nickelback, Mark Ronson, The Enemy, Pigeon Detectives, Kate Nash, Scouting For Girls and Just Jack to name but a few, not to mention that straight-to-mobile dance music as favoured by tracksuited top-deck skip-rats on a bus near you.

Anyway, surely this heavy rotation can have a ruinous effect on the hapless poppets? I initially thought of Duffy, say, as being just about passable – blessed with a decent soulful voice with songs that, if not something I would choose to listen to, were at least tastefully arranged with a nod to classic soul. However, she is played so fecking often on mainstream radio that familiarity has progressed beyond contempt and now has me thinking that Warwick Avenue is not in fact a tube station, rather one of the more severe circles of Hell from Dante’s Inferno.

Don’t get me started on the presenters either. Prior to my exposure to Radio 1, I was faintly aware of Jo Whiley as being a fairly warm and gregarious character on TV. However, since I discovered that she will without warning (and with malice of forethought) slide a Mika track into the playlist like a knife between the ribs, I now think of her as Jo Whiley: The Smiling Assassin.

At least with Chris Moyles you know you’re getting an abrasive, corpulent lout from the outset. I was most heartened when I read the following line in John Peel’s autobiography - “When Chris Moyles came to Radio 1, I thought about strapping explosives to myself and taking us both out. I’m an old man now, it’ll make little difference.” However, I was slightly deflated when I read on and found that when they met “he realised he rather liked him.”

But then, perhaps it is testament to the warm and gentle nature of the great man that he found it in his heart to forgive Moyles. I, on the other hand, cannot and feel that radio would be a better place were Moyles to indeed dissolve in a cloud of semtex and semi-digested pies.

To put this into context, let me state that I find myself praying for the occasional light relief of tweedy Radio 2, featuring such daytime luminaries as Ken Bruce, Terry Wogan and Steve Wright. Granted, these three gents may play Summer Holiday by Cliff Richard or something by Tex-Mex nightmare merchants The Mavericks, but you should only hear each individual atrocity once in a blue moon, or sandwiched between some nice Motown or Kinks – it’s just enough to prevent me stabbing kitchen implements into my optical organs.

Yes, a little autonomy is a wonderful thing – I only pray the string-pullers at Radio 1 become aware of this salient point, lest my working day sees me develop further into a ticking timebomb of misanthropic, silent rage.