AN unending war rages for the soul of Radio 1 and it is between John Peel, its venerable musical conscience, and whoever presents its breakfast show. On one side, Peel fights for pop music as a serious art form. On the other, under the various banners of wacky-chappie, celebrity-obsessive, metro-bird or shock-jock, the DJ fights for listeners and career survival. One cannot imagine either having much to say to the other, and since Peel broadcasts so late at night the opportunities for confrontation arise rarely — rarely but not never.

“When I joined I think John thought I was the Antichrist,” says Chris Moyles, Radio 1’s breakfast DJ de jour and, at 29, the station’s self-styled saviour. “He accused me of being DLT in waiting.”

For younger readers, Dave Lee Travis succeeded Noel Edmonds as the breakfast compere in the Seventies. To be compared to the Hairy Cornflake is no compliment.

“So I replied with something shocking, like he’s Kenny Everett in waiting because Kenny Everett’s dead and it’s only a matter of time before John pops his clogs.”

Ouch, I say, for Moyles has managed to do what he has failed to in days of assiduous listening: he has shocked me.

“I was a bit of a crazy maverick,” he admits.

But this wasn’t on air? “No, no. And he’s never said anything about it, but everyone else went, ‘Don’t say bad things about John. And I’m like, ‘Well, he takes the piss out of me so I’ll take the piss out of him. That’s how it works.’ But then you talk to him and John’s got a fantastic sense of humour.”

And now the two get on as famously as Smashy and Nicey. On the morning of our interview at Radio 1’s HQ, quarantined a few streets away from Broadcasting House, they even joshed on air. Moyles and his chatty team had been discussing Action Men with the exclusive “eagle eyes” movement when Moyles, to his evident embarrassment, noticed Peel lurking outside. He was after Moyles’s autograph for his village fête — “small, rural community,” he explained — and had been waiting for him to put on another record. “Then,” said Peel, “I realised I might be waiting for ever.”

Ah, banter-ful Radio 1! But Peel is right in thinking that music is incidental to the Chris Moyles show. Even Moyles does not like most of it very much and, in his postmodern, deconstructivist way, makes no pretence that he, rather than some playlist bureaucrat, has chosen it. Sometimes he’ll forget to back-announce a track, which annoys the purist in me. Otherwise, I tell him, I have found it surprisingly easy to shed my Radio 4 Today habit — and with it all the cares of the world — in favour of the micro-universe of a man whose worries rarely extend beyond the admittedly far-reaching perimeter of his own flesh.

Encouraged by the Broadcasting Standards Council’s upholding of half a dozen complaints against him in as many years, critics and correspondents to Radio 4’s Feedback have called him a cheap shock merchant. But while it was undoubtedly intemperate of him to say two years ago that he wished to rip off the head of a competitor and “poo in his neck”, Moyles these days is more a saucy solipsist than a shock-jock. Within his tiny kingdom he is the despot, but a benevolent one. The insults he delivers to his team — Dave, Aled, Jules and Rachel — tickle rather than wound.

“The reviews for our show that still appear really make me laugh,” he agrees. “I’m just a sexist, egotistical bigmouth, or lardy-mouth or whatever, who surrounds himself with laughing sycophants who just agree with everything I say. That’s not it at all.”

Nor is it, or why would we listen? Since he took over from Sara Cox in the new year he has added 700,000 listeners to the slot’s weekly audience, a fact he did not refrain from repeating endlessly on his return from holiday in May. A new jingle was composed, a Chris Evans-style rant saved only by its punchline:

“He’ll buy a yacht and a villa in Majorca
But nothing’ll really change
He’s still a big fat porker.”

Anyhow, I say, congratulations. He really is the saviour of Radio 1. “I actually used the saviour line years before I came to Radio 1. I was the saviour of late-night radio when I was on Capital. I was the saviour of late-night radio at the radio station before Capital, which was Chiltern Radio, based out of Luton. Before that I was the saviour of early-evening radio. So I’ve been using the saviour tack for years. Now I’m the saviour of early-morning radio.”