I had not realised John Peel hardly ever went on foreign holidays, or that he was a nervous flyer. He was explaining this to one of the guests on his Radio 4 programme Home Truths on the morning earlier this month when I went to meet him at a studio in Broadcasting House.

That day Peel was recording interviews for a programme that would be transmitted after he and his wife Sheila had departed for a Peruvian resort in the Andes. We did not know at the time that he would not return to the studio, or that I would be transcribing this interview after his death.

As he mentioned the various tranquillisers he would be taking to ward off the terrors of the long flight and described their destination — “just the usual tourist spots, you know” — he didn’t sound terribly excited at the prospect. But it was a free trip — “a sort of junket”— and Sheila was looking forward to it, and that, it seemed, was the main thing.

I have no idea whether he was actually ill at the time, but Peel certainly looked as if he needed a holiday. I had heard that his friend and former Radio 1 mucker Andy Kershaw had recently told him, “John, you look terrible!”, and frankly it was hard to disagree.

A steadily expanding pot belly, combined with his middling (5ft 7in) stature was turning Peel into the original roly-poly man. More alarming were his grey, sagging features and in particular those small, unnaturally sunken eyes. This guy, you felt, hadn’t slept properly for weeks.

He said he’d been working hard recently on his autobiography, which was now half finished. The toughest part was sorting through the thousands of letters he’d kept from musicians he had supported over the years and deciding which to use and which to discard.

By a strange coincidence one of those old correspondents suddenly appeared in the lounge area outside the studio where we were talking: this was Bill Nelson, former leader of the long forgotten 1970s progressive band Be Bop Deluxe, here to talk to the digital radio channel 6 music. Peel greeted him affably and the two elderly rock gents reminisced for a while. “I think I might have actually got rid of his letters,” Peel said later with a sly grin.

I had come to interview him in connection with a feature I was preparing for The Sunday Times Magazine on Home Truths, the Saturday morning programme of real-life stories and quirky listeners’anecdotes that finally turned him, in his sixties, into a slightly unlikely hero of middle England. He was happy to oblige, although he was quick to point out: “I always let people know that the Radio 1 job is my primary interest. Home Truths has never been in my hands the way the Radio 1 programme has.”

This was broadly true, but not the whole story. While Peel was always allowed total freedom to play what he liked during his 37-year tenure at Radio 1 — unlike Home Truths where the content was submitted by listeners and selected by the production team — he never had any say as to when the John Peel show went out. Recently it had moved back to 11.30pm, a graveyard slot, which meant that for three nights a week Peel had to stay up till the early hours playing his favourite “ grime” tracks or checking rock’s new “indie” hopefuls.

Factor in the autobiography, a couple of days spent interviewing, scripting and recording Home Truths, and all the attendant toing and froing between London and his “Peel acres” converted farmhouse in Suffolk, and you began to realise why he was looking so rough. For a 65-year-old man who had three years previously been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, Peel had one punishing schedule.

But like the sturdy contributors who recount their traumatic experiences, dry-eyed, week in week out on Home Truths, Peel wasn’t complaining. Nor was he prepared to take any credit for the success of his programme. He was “very much at the mercy of the listeners”. The show wasn’t a personal achievement so much as an institution that had been kind enough to take him in.

“The only things I’ve got any experience of are things that have gone on for a long time,” he explained. “And that sort of success, if success indeed is what that is, can be very restrictive. During punk, for instance, the requirements of the audience took the programme out of my hands.”

That famously self-effacing manner belied the fact that Peel jumped at any chance of talking — on air and off — about himself , his wife and their four children. That day he was on his favourite hobbyhorse: youth employment. “The thing that bothers me as a parent, because it affects me four times, is the distress you feel, which surpasses all other distressing things, watching your grown-up children try to find decent work. One of my sons was treated so badly I said I was prepared to be the first white middle-class suicide bomber. I would go into his office and detonate myself if it meant I could take some of those bastards with me.” He’d tried to interest Home Truths listeners in this topic, he said, but got no response. “Other stuff that I’m not interested in at all they pick up and run with for weeks.”