Smash hit

Until, as his own jingle went, “they fire his arse”. How will he respond if next time Rajar reports that his figures have fallen (as they did when he occupied the afternoon slot)? “If they go down I’ll probably make a jingle saying ‘whoops, we’ve lost listeners, but it’s not our fault. It’s obviously your fault, listener-people’. It’s the kind of thing we do.”

Indeed it is, for Moyles is in a constant state of garrulous catharsis. It was, after all, not entirely good news for him in May. Shortly after it was announced that he had gained listeners, he lost out at the Sony Radio Awards. Treating triumph and disaster just the same, he jingle-ised this, too:

“He’s as cool as the Fonze
But the stupid Sony judges
Only gave him a bronze.”

“One thing that I’ll never run out of material about is me,” he explains. “Someone asked me a question years ago: ‘Won’t you ever run out of stuff to say?’ and I’m like, ‘You never run out of stuff to say in real life. You don’t wake up one morning and look at your wife and go, ‘I’ve run out of things to say to you.’ Just doesn’t happen.”

He obviously hasn’t witnessed the marriages I have.

Moylesey’s self-referential monologue holds its audience because it is delivered in the same tone of voice as its own. Just as a generation of Seventies students involuntarily imitated John Cleese when they attempted to be funny, so now the young customarily mistake themselves for observational comedians. Moyles serves Radio 1’s target audience of 15 to 24-year-olds and the “lower socioeconomic groups” by sharing their vocabulary and attitudes. He conjures up a personal soap opera that is an only marginally aspirational version of their own lives — Corrie, not Dallas. A big adventure, to be related and embellished, is a train ride from London to Birmingham that does not go quite to plan. A huge prize is two weeks’ semi-skiving in Portugal, where his show has relocated for Euro 2004. A satisfying accolade is to hear your car referred to as “nice wheels”. Hollywood flash — even Hollyoaks flash — is so remote it is not even worth dreaming about.

Moyles is not being patronising, for he has somehow managed to avoid evolving into a proper celebrity himself. He does not go to film premieres or “showbiz parties”. The “stars” he “knows” according to the jingle he plays are Roy Walker, Ant and Dec and Des Lynam. Interviewing Noel Gallagher last week, Moyles reduced him to just another northern lad who liked his cuppa with two teabags. When Fat Boy Slim turned up on Friday, it was to explain how he had smashed up his face falling out of bed. Like you do. He barely even bothers to be rude about the famous. The day we met he had read aloud the tabloid headlines reporting that Gaby Roslin’s marriage had failed but could not think of anything cruel to add.

“A few years ago,” he admits, “when I first started I would probably have said something different about the Gaby Roslin thing. I’d never met her and the chances were I was never going to meet her. But no . . . well, I’ve done it before. You’ve just gone off on a rant about somebody and then you bump into them and you go, ‘Hi’, and they go, ‘Oh, I have a fat arse, do I?’ ”

In a rare break with human history, Moyles’s success seems to have made him a nicer person. His equanimity, his satisfaction with his little but magnified life, is overthrown by one thing only: young women, a breed he refers to as “top-heavy lovelies”. The authorities have in the past rebuked him for an unpleasant edge to his on-air dealings with the opposite sex. The BSC upheld a complaint about his “aggressive and sexually suggestive comments ” to a young woman caller to Capital. On his first Radio 1 breakfast show he interviewed Victoria Beckham and jokingly called her a whore. The last complaint upheld was over his wish to lead the virgin Charlotte Church “through the forest of her sexuality”.

“I still today can’t believe that was upheld. And I have a problem with that. I thought she was 16 at that point. So in the eyes of the law a sexual 16-year-old woman is exactly the same as a sexual 42-year-old woman.”

I say that young men think about women coarsely enough without further encouragement from Radio 1. “But whatever your beliefs, the chances are that on a weekly basis you’ll look at at least one woman and have mucky thoughts,” he challenges me.

But I’ve been brought up not to mention mine. “Yeah, but I have a compulsion to do so. I’ve got a three-hour radio show to fill every day where I talk about myself. Gaby Roslin, see now Gaby’s on the market. Would you sleep with Gaby Roslin?” I say the gallant thing. “See, there you go.”

And he wouldn’t? “I probably would because she’s famous — no, I’m loved up with my girlfriend Sophie, I’m very happy.”