The wicked truth about me and Radio 2

Certain nuggets of knowledge prove that one's youth is slipping away. For example, I now know where the local garden centre is. I have a surefire technique for stopping a baby crying (you look it in the eyes and go "Wah wah wah"). I have applied Deep Heat muscle rub voluntarily for the first time.

Certain nuggets of knowledge prove that one's youth is slipping away. For example, I now know where the local garden centre is. I have a surefire technique for stopping a baby crying (you look it in the eyes and go "Wah wah wah"). I have applied Deep Heat muscle rub voluntarily for the first time.

Most telling, I can now quickly find Radio 2 on the dial - towards the bottom of the FM frequency, just along from my local illegal drum'n'bass station.

Thanks to an impeccably bourgeois upbringing, Radio 4 is my station of choice - but when I needed something a little more adrenalised, Radio 1 was my port of call. This week's squeeze-out of Andy Kershaw, however, reminds me that my relationship with "The Nation's Favourite" is not what it once was.

These days, its target demographic seems to be the kind of people who spend their leisure hours in a maelstrom of hire cars, class-A drugs and teutonically monotonous dance music, driving from city to city in search of the most "wicked weekend".

The bloke who cuts my hair is like this: as with most hairdressers, he never fails to ask me what I'm doing Saturday and Sunday, but always follows it with the question, "Gonna be a big one, mate?" There's no answer to that.

Radio 1 now tends to be the preserve of people who care little for what they're listening to, as long as it goes "duh-duh-duh-duh" and is deemed sufficiently, er, wicked. They have little in common with me and my peers - and I strongly get the feeling that we are scheduled to join the metaphorical pile of debris along with the corpses of Dave Lee Travis Simon Bates and Adrian Juste. In other words, we're old and square, and Radio 1 wants rid of us.

But where do we go? Last weekend, I found out. The BBC is currently attempting to turn Radio 2 into a catch-all music station for everyone who doesn't listen to its younger sibling. According to the hype, out go The Carpenters and Charles Aznavour, and in comes a sparkling new world of "quality" rock music.

That means I'm often in my element. Take Jonathan Ross's Saturday Morning show - a pretty seamless amalgam of wit, topicality and decent records (Last week, he played "So Lonely" by The Police, which, oddly, never fails to lift my mood).

The new line in hour-long documentaries is also impressive; last week saw an authoratitive examination of those cerebral gay disco kings, The Pet Shop Boys. It sure beats James Last.

The problem comes when Radio 2 reverts to type, and nightmarish voices from my childhood blare forth from the radio. Jimmy "Bye for now" Young I can take - he stands with Brian Perkins, John Peel and the cast of The Archers as one of the great reassuring radio voices. Some, however, unfailingly bounce me back to Radio 1, which tends to bounce me about like a dodgem car:

"Hello! This is Roy Hudd with another crushingly unfunny instalment of The News Huddlines, featuring June Whitfield!"

Boing! "Duh-duh-duh-duh! Wicked!"

Boing! "Good evening, one and all. Welcome to Sing Something Simple."

Boing! "Duh-duh-Even wickeduh-duh!"

The advent of internet radio will apparently put an end to all this. Liberated from the problem of overcrowded airwaves, broadcasters will provide "niched" programming, aimed at satisfying even the most pernickity listener. I, for example, will have no problem finding a network that puts reliable political coverage and Manchester City results next to the kind of old-fashioned pop music played on guitars.

Well, dream on. For now, I think I'll stick to Radio 4, interspersed with my CD pile. This weekend, for example, I popped into Our Price and bought Honky Chateau by Elton John. Wicked!