Broadcasting their breakfast show from a tiny studio inside a stone cottage overlooking the icy waters of Loch Gairloch, two ladies in the prime of life are bringing in the new year at the smallest commercial radio station in Britain.

And, if Anne Gray and Maisie Lyall, the DJs for Two Lochs Radio, are to be believed, it promises to be quiet in Gairloch, the idyllic village that straggles along the margins of remote Wester Ross. In this place you have to make your own fun in the aftermath of a raucous Hogmanay, because there is precious little else to do — a fact that Mrs Lyall makes abundantly clear when she addresses herself to the script marked “What's on today”.

“The Aultbea and Gairloch medical practice will be closed until Monday 5th January,” she tells her listeners. “Gairloch filling station will be closed today and Friday; the waste transfer station is also closed and so is the Gairloch leisure centre.”

However, not all is quiet. “On Friday, Gairloch Golf Club has its annual Paracetemol Open for members and guests. Tee time is 10.30 am and the captain recommends relative sobriety, though this is not essential.”

Two Lochs Radio serves the communities around Loch Gairloch and Loch Ewe. According to Alex, Mrs Gray's husband, the station's one paid employee, it “even has listeners 20 miles away in Kinlochewe”. But, across this huge swath of wilderness country, there are only 1,861 people ready to tune in.

Such a tiny audience is far below the threshold that was formerly required for a station to be granted a commercial licence by the Radio Authority (now Ofcom), and it took more than three years for Mr Gray and his colleagues to win their case.

Since it started broadcasting at the end of 2003, Two Lochs, which has an annual turnover of £24,000, has sustained itself on business sponsorship — from the local chemist and an inn, among others - and by organising fundraisers, such as Wednesday's Hogmanay dance.

Quite an event that turned out to be. Hosted by Campbell Elder, a former RAF engineer who is now a presenter, 140 people whooped it up until dawn. Mrs Gray dedicates a track to Mr Elder, thanking him for his heroic efforts. The song is by the Killers, and asks in its final chorus: “Are we human, or are we dancers?”

“Apparently Campbell is neither human nor a dancer at four in the morning,” chuckles Mrs Gray as the music fades. Luckily, Mr Elder's lunchtime show has been pre-recorded.

It's a laugh and a joke and a place for gossip. However, for the locals, Two Lochs Radio, which broadcasts for 38 hours a week with 15 regular volunteer presenters, is also a reliable noticeboard for village activities. For those farther afield — internet listeners in Iceland, Dubai, America and the South Pacific — it provides a beguiling picture of how life can be in a remote and beautiful part of Scotland.

The Grays, a couple in their fifties, know all about the allure of that lifestyle, because they gave up everything to come to Gairloch a decade ago. Mr Gray met his wife when he was an IT specialist working for the BBC and the Open University and she was a technical editor at the Natural History Museum in London. They started a family, lived near Milton Keynes and endured the tyranny of the commuting life for too many years before a generous redundancy offer gave them the chance to change their lives.

Has Mrs Gray any regrets about leaving Buckinghamshire? “No regrets at all,” she says. “I just wanted to get away from the rat race. People come here to live, they take on different jobs and almost become different people. Everyone trusts each other. You cannot buy the kind of support and community that we have here.”

It's the end of the breakfast show and a pre-recorded programme begins featuring Two Lochs Radio's “interviews of the year”. First up is Mr Gray's interview with another incomer, the new proprietor of the local newsagents: “Had you always wanted to run a shop?” The answer, for many of Two Lochs' presenters and listeners, is: “I hadn't given it a thought, until I fell in love with Gairloch.”

Lochside listeners

— Two Lochs Radio ( 2LR) serves an area the size of Greater Glasgow, with a potential adult audience of 1,861. Radio Clyde, Scotland’s largest commercial station, has about 700,000 listeners, and Capital Radio in London averages 862,000