On a scale of 1 to 100, the former being hard and the latter being Kerry Katona after a couple of Irn Brus, hating Chris Moyles is somewhere along the minus scale. People far and wide congregate together to attack the moronic wanker responsible for the 'vapid, inconsequential guff' that his soon-to-be ex-station outputs, even if they don't actually listen to his show. By the time you read this, he'll be long gone from his morning show, so what better time to fire some last-minute parting shots? It's easy. Go on. Have a go. You've got plenty to pick from. You could opt for the physical appearance and his rotund figure, even if the guy has actually lost a shed load of weight and slimmed down into the best shape of his life. Failing that, try his anti-music policy, where no songs get played before 7am, a crime against radio in a world where people are forbidden from switching to one of a hundred other music stations, or to ask Spotify to stream almost any song ever recorded. If Chris Moyles doesn't play a song for a whole thirty minutes, how will his seven million listeners ever get through the day? It's a wonder that they actually manage to prepare for work without falling out of their bedroom windows, such is the imbalance of society on a day without Lady Gaga playing for the first of her 639 appearances on the playlist that hour. Why stop there? Because of him, maybe some of you don't listen to Radio 1 at all, because of the overwhelming influence he has over the output when he's sat at home getting his cars nicked; lord knows how many times I've tried to listen to Skream and Benga without Moylesy ruining it by simply not being there. The prick. Hell, given that most of the people who dislike him don't even listen to the show, why not just make things up instead? I'm sure I once saw Chris exchanging burial tips with Ian Brady. It sounds just like the kind of thing he would do. Or, like many of us on Friday morning, you could sit back and reflect on the end to one of the most important shows in British broadcasting today. After eight and a half years at the helm of the second biggest radio show in the UK, Moylesy is bidding farewell to the morning shift and taking millions of listeners and an undesirably older demographic with him. In some respects, the show has been almost considered separate to the rest of the station for a while now, one which is obsessed with reaching the under 30s. Many of those who tune in every morning do so as appointment listening, in comparison to those who accidentally leave their radios on for Greg James, or who are held at gun-point to listen to Fearne Cotton. The cross-over isn't as broad as one would hope, soon to be provable by numbers once Nick Grimshaw takes over and turns the show into 6 Music for teenagers, a modern-day Les Misérables for twats. What he also takes with him, though many would be glad to see the back of it, is unadulterated ego. This is not a man who thinks highly of himself as a person, but a DJ who is confident in his skills behind the studio desk to produce the best show that he knows he can. Countless times, Moyles has found himself in battles with upper management regarding song choices, the amount of songs getting played per show, and the endless red tape now stapling every BBC show together in a post-Brand and Ross (Brandross!) world. Many young presenters would and now will stick to what they are told - play this many songs, do this for the station brand, plug this artist, nail this sexy lady, smear your face with jam and stick it into a bee's nest - without ever mustering enough courage to stick up for themselves and the show that they know their listeners enjoy the most. The Moyles breakfast show didn't become appointment listening for such a high percentage of its audience without knowing exactly what brought them back every morning. Speaking as a self-confessed fan of the show - something hard to admit when you're sat in the middle of a Stewart Lee gig or immersing myself in the latest series of The Thick Of It, where the target fan base avoids a public overlap - many of the usual complaints happen to be everything that made me a dedicated listener from 2006 onwards. I don't want a song every five minutes, it's a distraction. Nor do I care for short and snappy links between songs, no matter how good Chris actually is at generic daytime presenting (as proven during a two-day run as emergency cover for Greg James last spring), or a lack of bravado that fronts some of the most popular shows in radio history - Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, James Whale and Chris Evans know this only too well. Sure, John Peel was a different kind of broadcaster who commanded great respect amongst his peers and the public, but he was a once in a lifetime personality. I don't want, nor need another John Peel; I know what I'm getting when I listen to the Chris Moyles show, which is why I stick with it. If I want music, I'll listen to 6 Music. But I want to listen to inane rambling in-jokes and parody songs, so I listen to Radio 1. Or did. Until now. I'm 18 years old and have been for the last seven years. I'm within the remit for Radio 1's target demographic, yet never felt included in that key teen audience whenever the likes of Gemma 'a young, female Chris Moyles if he had an afro and was shit' Cairney patronise me like a small child presenting his parents with a felt-tip drawing of an upside-down dog on his stomach. It's hard to connect with a station of T(wat)4 presenters obsessed with the latest Jessie J or One Direction song, talking about how well wicked everything is whilst wearing a Topman fedora hat and auditioning for a guest spot on the new-found bible of lowest denominator teen culture, Celebrity Juice. Imagine my excitement when I watched that show for the first time after the series-premiere of TTOI last weekend; like running out of wine and resorting to pouring diarrhoea into your eyeballs. The only person on that station who made me feel like I was actually welcome to listen to the station without needing a sharp, stabbing instrument at my bedside was Moyles, whose style - whilst abrasive and often confrontational - was honest with his listeners. The art of a good presenter is making the people on the other end of the dial feel like what they are being told is the truth. Whilst most derided him for berating his bosses on air for missing payments owed to him, I was jumping onto my chair in a Tom Cruise moment, begging for more from the self-professed Saviour. When most presenters tow the corporate line, Moylesy slips in the occasional dig at how ridiculous the whole process is. It opens the door just a little bit, allowing us to peak into the world behind the microphones. It's not complete honesty; nothing in the media ever is. But it feels real enough to draw me in, to make me want to be a part of this world. I never considered myself a voyeur, more an inactive participant. I was there. I just never chimed in. He never stopped talking to me, though. That's why I stayed the course. Given the alternatives, what other choice was there? And what of heir-apparent Grimmy? Well, in a lovely spot of irony, he will gain one listener my place: my mother, who turns 45 next year. You just can't buy demographics these days. Sure, it may be only a couple of months older than what Moyles attracts now, but then he never appealed to a generation by age, merely by disillusionment. You're never too young or old to feel patronised, marginalised and without a voice to keep you company and speak out in real, down to earth terms when the rest of the world turns into one monotonous, robotic sound bite. Chris Moyles was that voice. It had an annoying Northern accent, but it was our annoying Northern accent. It still is, until it goes to sing for Andrew Lord Lloyd Webber and then we'll kick him to the curb like the sell-out that he is. If you have to measure the man's legacy on anything, let it be this. When I turned 18, my dream was to become a journalist. Nothing in the world excited me more than writing articles, conducting interviews and exploring every nuance of a story waiting to happen. Over the spring and summer months before going off to university to drink myself into my twenties, I began every weekday morning listening to the Chris Moyles show, preparing scripts on Saturday and presenting an online radio show with my friend about professional wrestling. The cycle would continue every week for eight months in total until September came along. On the day of induction, our course leader introduced us to the lecturers of seven individual medium modules, each one more excited than the last to sell theirs to us. When it was over, we were ushered out of the room and told to walk into whichever room we wanted to spend the next three years studying. I walked into my room, sat down, and began my journey towards becoming... a radio presenter. As you can see, that turned out as well as I'd hoped. Like me, a whole new generation of kids are waking up and thinking that they too want to become radio personalities, music disc jockeys, shock jocks, interview wizards, political virtuosos, or simply one step closer to being the next Danny Baker, Zane Lowe or the awkwardly racist old man on Radio WM. Hopefully they'll do a better job of it than I did. For his part, Moyles has helped make radio cool again. A 15 year old Catholic school drop out worked his way through hospital radio, shop radio, local radio and even international radio to become one of the most synonymous names with the medium, for better or worse, in years. That's dedication to the craft, but it's also a tale of what can happen when you do something you love and do it well. For many teenagers leaving school last year, this year or even next year, their dreams may not be too far behind. So what if their dream is to be the next Chris Moyles? So what if that means more overbearing, loud-mouthed, arrogant tossers playing less music and dedicating more airtime to what unbelievably tedious story they have to share from the night before? If he has encouraged even two more people to want to spend the rest of their lives in the radio industry, geeking out over obscure shows the world over, exciting themselves even twenty years into their careers with the latest trends and music, and fighting the nameless and shameless in suits to keep the sanctity of the relationship between presenter and listener honest and trusting, then that's two more people than we have right now. Some would argue that one Chris Moyles is one too many. To my ear, one has never been quite enough. Good bye, Chris Moyles. Radio will be far less loud, egotistical, self-indulgent, truthful and downright entertaining without you.
