"The Broadcasting Service should bring into the greatest possible number of homes the fullest degree of all that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement. Rightly developed and controlled, it will become a world influence with immense potentialities for good — equally for harm if its function is wrongly or loosely conceived," said John (later Lord) Reith, first director-general of the BBC, in 1925.

"Are you a bit of a raver? Been around a bit? Not too much? Not known as the Collingdale tandem or anything?" asks Tony Blackburn of one of his innumerable phone-in participants (female) on BBC Radio London in 1985.

Is that the sound of Lord Reith revolving in his grave? Certainly there is plenty in the wild and wacky world of radio today that would have made him unhappy, and not only on the BBC.

For those of us with musical interests, it's quite natural that our enmity and condemnation should fall upon that band of utterly self-regarding individuals they call the DJs.

We can't blame them for the records that are chosen because, of course, they don't actually do that. Indeed, the 1978 Annan Committee inquiry into broadcasting was adamant that they should not be allowed anywhere near the choice of records because of the possibilities for corruption they might fall prey to. They were thinking, of course, of the US payola scandal of the late 1950s where DJs were systematically paid to play records.

No, all that's a side issue, as indeed is music itself where most of these characters are concerned. The real problem is the gaps between the music where the old-style prattle has recently given way to a succession of other equally charmless devices: there's the allegedly humourous intervention by a string of "characters" all "played" by the DJ itself; there's the interminable repartee between the possessors of adjacent "spots"; there's the parade of instant micro-phone-ins, where the hapless listener gets the chance to a single phrase, usually of gushing praise; and perhaps worst of all there's the "late-nite" voice, hovering between seductive and soporific.

Apart from actually being an impressionist, or a producer of Woolworth's "Hot Hits" records, being a radio DJ is the one place you can make a living by imitating someone else in detail.

Have you heard the legion of Kenny Everett impersonators on Radio One? Wasn't the original bad enough? And what about that guy they brought in to replace Terry Wogan?

There's nothing particularly new in this. The first batch of BBC announcers, brought in for their faultless pronunciation of the King's English, their ability to speak all the major European languages, and their boundless tact and courtesy when helping "novices overcome their terror of the microphone" soon found themselves the subject of a rather un-BBC personality cult.

With the arrival of the "crooners" and record programmes, things got worse, at least according to social commentator Richard Hoggart, writing in 1957: "There is the lowbrow-gang-spirit of some gramophone-record features in which young men, accompanying their items with a stream of pally patter, offer programmes whose whole composition assumes that whatever the greatest number like most is best and the rest are the aberrations of 'eggheads'. Always the apologists for these programmes make the usual defence — that they are 'in good taste — homely — full of the pathos and joy of ordinary lives'; and that they are also, 'new — arresting — startling-sensational — full of gusto — and handsomely endowed with prizes.'"

Well, things have changed a bit since then, but the resemblance is clear. Hoggart goes on, "These productions belong to a vicarious, spectators' world; they offer nothing which can really grip the brain or heart. They assist the gradual drying-up of the more positive, the fuller, the more co-operative kinds of enjoyment, in which one gains much by giving much."

To which I can only say it's a good job he wrote the book before the arrival of Radio One or he might have got really nasty. But let's move on, leaving behind us the DJs, those pathetic creatures who have to have their names sung to them a hundred times a day, presumably in case they forget.

Let us turn instead to radio itself, and its curious history. In the USA, of course, the thing was left to itself, and Government interference was kept to a minimum, principally being there to ensure compatibility of technical standards. Otherwise it was the law of the jungle (sorry, market).

Meanwhile, in good old paternalist Britain, the authorities were convinced that the new medium needed a firm hand. First there was just the one transmitter, and one BBC programme to go with it. Then the transmitters spread across the regions and with them came some element of autonomy. But by the time Reith left the BBC, a year before the war, things were tending towards a unitary national service, which was duly inaugurated in 1939 as the Home Service.

The Light Programme followed in 1945, and the imaginatively titled Third Programme a year later. All three were national stations (there was also the international Empire Service), and they followed the Reith line that each one should provide a complete balance of entertainment, with music, news, drama, comedy and variety and so on.

The threefold division seems to have taken a long time to arrive, but these stations were emphatically not what we nowadays call generic ("of a kind") programmes. If anything, there seems to have been a division by "brow" ie: "highbrow" Third; "middlebrow" Home; "lowbrow" Light. Or putting it another way, a division by broad social classes, reflected more in manner than content.

However the division was arrived at, there was a serious effort to maintain the balance of the programming, although each station carried its own defined interests: serious music and drama for the Third Programme, dance music for the Light Programme, and current affairs for the Home Service.

In America, meanwhile, the pressure for advertisers, and the development of appropriate RF amplification techniques, made giant transmitters supported by a minimum of "editorial" budgeting the popular way forward. Given a lively regionalised (and racially divided) musical culture, supporting entirely regionalised record companies, it was inevitable that regional radio stations would fall in with that. The air was filled with music, and of course it didn't stay exactly where it was aimed but spread around a little. And so it was that all those curious hybrid forms of music we know as rock 'n' roll sprang up.

In Britain, of course, there was no similar geographical isolation to allow regional diversity to flourish. A national programme or three was the obvious answer. One big transmitter plus one small island equals one happy listening audience. What more could they want?

When rock music arrived in the late 1950s (and especially its British disciples), room was found for it on the Light Programme in things like "Saturday Club", which I can dimly remember. There wasn't much more: it was a minority interest like any other, went the logic.

The pirates, led by Radio Caroline's Ronan O'Rahilly, found that there was an audience for continuous pop music, including the more rough and ready r'n'b sounds that the nice BBC declined to play. From 1964, this development appeared to strike terror into the heart of the BBC which still, to a limited extent, felt it had a duty to uphold cultural "standards" in a quasi-Reithian fashion.

What if the pirates started broadcasting political material? That was one fear.

At a 1965 cabinet discussion, that well-known youth supporter Anthony Wedgewood-Benn (aka Tony Benn) proposed banning Caroline, and the Cabinet agreed. Realising what a vote-loser this would be (even though the voting age was 21) they sought to replace the pirates with a new BBC service. The money for that could come from advertising, suggested Benn, but he was outvoted.

"The Government recognises that there's a need for a new service devoted to a continuous popular music programme," said the White Paper, although needle-time restrictions made that a little tricky.

From the beginning, Radio One was the first generic station, although it kept some of the programming traditions: features, discussion programmes and so on.

With Radio One came the pattern of broadcasting we see today. Although presented as a simple re-labelling, the One, Two, Three, Four set-up was the start of a change to generic programming as a policy, despite the immense difficulties the BBC had with its audience, and which it has to this day.

The BBC audience, especially for Radio Four, detests change. And the nature of a truly generic system is that it requires not only change, but continuous change by the listener if it is to work. You are your own programme controller, skipping around the airwaves, finding what you want. In 1967, when Radio One started, there were squeals of anguish from people, especially the elderly, who simply couldn't find their old favourites.

It wasn't always their fault: a lot of radios had been tuned to one station for so long that they wouldn't do what they were instructed to do.

The whole question came up for grabs again with the Annan Committee of 1979. A group of Radio One producers took their lives in their hands and dared to criticise the continuing progress towards an "all-music" channel, suggesting instead a "network for the young". Lord Annan rejected that, but praised "Newsbeat" and said he'd like to see more inserts about films, or exhibitions or trailers for programmes on other networks. He also said that "cross-trailing" should be a general policy — and that Radio One might try covering jazz: clearly a man after my own heart.

Meanwhile, BBC local radio had replaced the old regional structure, as a kind of low-cost Blue Peter squeezy bottle operation, with almost no needle-time to play with. Read the original BBC policy documents and it sounds astonishing, almost revolutionary: BBC staff were to provide simply a support and advisory role, training groups and individuals to use the equipment and make their own programmes for transmission. Of course, it didn't survive. The professionals came in and all those amateurs went away.

Listening to Radio London today, with Tony Blackburn doing his loathsome lecher routine, I wonder whether that constituted progress. Of course, Radio London never had any chance to be anything other than what it is because it had to compete with London's commercial station, Capital Radio.

The Capital story is really very funny. A dentist, a film producer and various others (including a local paper group) get together and convince the IBA that their pitch, "more records than any other official radio station in the history of British broadcasting", is the best way to serve England's capital city. "Much of the music content will have little relevance in itself but the manner in which it is presented will," they said. Then they added, "Our Morning Man will be humorous, warm, above all an intelligent entertainer."

In practice, that meant a bland MOR music policy that was changed fairly shortly, then changed back, now changed again, oscillating between Radio Two and Radio One. Oh, and on the journey they closed their newsroom and axed drama, serials and dramatised documentary.

The pressure group Local Radio Workshop noted that in an average week, "Capital played 132 hours of DJ programmes, 2316 hours of "specialist music" (hello Charlie), and 12 hours of everything else.

One last quote from its proposals to the IBA: "The Top 40 will be played, not to distraction, but with the awareness that much of it is unoriginal or manufactured on a conveyor belt basis. No broadcaster can ignore the ever-changing pop scene, for at its best it is the language and philosophy of youth." Er, yes...

But now, here's something new. Radio One is to get its own FM Stereo band, in mid-1988, though as a result of Radio Two listeners' complaints, not Radio One fans' demands.

But there's also community radio, a development which sounds uncannily like what the BBC local radio stations were meant to be before they actually happened. If you'd applied by the end of October 1985, you could have got a "small neighbourhood licence" for an area the size of south-west London, or a licence to run an ethnic language station, or even a sort of Channel Four of The Air, as proposed by Tony Elliott, the man who brought you Time Out, London's what's-on Magazine. What, no "language and philosophy of youth" programmes?

What I want to know is, why can't we have satellite radio? One hundred and fifty stations from Radio Moscow to Great Western Radio all on tap. All you'd need is a bloody great dish in the garden. No, here's a better idea, why not have an aerial built into the set...