Dear Matthew Bannister: A listener who grew up with the tranny tells the controller of Radio 1 why he is one of many thousands who have been turned off by the station's changes

I was there with my transistor that morning in 1967 when Tony Blackburn played 'Flowers in the Rain' and Radio 1 began. I joined the Radio 1 Club. I once had a request played by Stuart Henry. Radio 1 supplied the musical soundtrack to my life. Whenever I turned the car radio on or switched on the stereo as background music to my word processing, Radio 1 was my chosen station.

Not any more. Recently I reached the decision (apparently along with 2,199,999 other people in 1993, according to the listening figures released on Monday) that your revamped Radio 1 had become unbearable.

I'm now 40, so it might not surprise you to hear that someone in Middle Age was deserting Radio 1 for the gentler melodies of Radio 2, preferring to spend his declining years with Gloria Hunniford and Wout Steenhuis and his Thousand Hawaiian Guitars. But it's not the music your station plays I object to - the music I like, it's the music I want to hear. What I don't want is the incessant prattling with which you have now displaced the music. As the new controller of Radio 1, do you really believe that listeners are keen to hear an endless succession of news, traffic reports, weather, sport, celebrity interviews, aimless conversation and more news?

I don't know whether you've ever had a decorator or gas fitter working in your house but when they put the radio on, they don't switch on with the hope of listening to Emma Freud holding a debate on the ethics of extracting eggs from aborted foetuses. When you're paper-hanging, what you want is rock'n'roll.

Your big idea of giving Steve Wright the 'all-new breakfast show' has backfired: he seems to play one record every 10 minutes. The rest of the time is filled up with news bulletins, comic sketches, celeb interviews, sports reports and some of the most inconsequential chit-chat ever broadcast (the sort of schoolkid conversations you overhear on buses about last night's television programmes, which are amusing for no more than three seconds). Steve Wright appears to share the studio with about eight people. You might not remember, but all Tony Blackburn had was an imaginary dog called Arnold. Danny Baker (your great new Radio 1 acquisition) on Saturday and Sunday mornings is even worse. Not content with boring everyone to death with his encyclopaedic knowledge of Sixties and Seventies trivia, he repeatedly makes it clear that Radio 1 is beneath his dignity, carrying on like a sulky adolescent at his younger sister's party. All her friends want to listen to are their Bay City Rollers singles, while he insists on playing his Steely Dan albums.

Your station has become so awful, Matthew, that I wonder whether it is part of some deliberate plot to run things down prior to it being flogged off to Richard Branson or some media mogul. Surely it must have occurred to you that the one advantage that Radio 1 has over the commercial stations is that it doesn't have to play commercials: it can play non-stop music. No news bulletins every 10 minutes, no comic sketches, no chit-chat - just records.

I'll give you a few weeks: if things don't improve, I shall be sending back my Radio 1 Club membership card.