At least I assume it's safe to confess that I'm listening to - and mostly enjoying - XFM again. When it started its amateurishness infuriated me - good music radio just doesn't have to be this bad, I'd shout at the radio twenty times a day, usually during Gary Crowley's show. I could never work out whether employing Gary Crowley was a sophisticated post-modern joke. Were the station and Gary having a laugh, with a pretend-crap show? Was the joke on us? Or was the joke on him? Was he unaware of how unamusing and generally embarrassing he was?

Anyway, while all good intense music-loving indie kids started web sites and no doubt wrote letters to the NME about those evil corporate money-grabbing bastards at the Capital Radio Group, I cheered that they had at least got one thing right. They got rid of the useless Crowley by offering him the graveyard shift, and lost that even crapper (if such a thing is possible) Bristolian toss-pot into the bargain.

Of course the new playlisted, Capitalized XFM was dire at first. They played music that was even a tad soft for Virgin, and the playlist was so short you could write it on the back of a bus ticket. Bob Geldof was an, ahem, interesting choice of drivetime DJ - for some reason the strict playlist rules did not apply to him. He could play anything he liked. And frequently did. Like Linda McCartney's posthumous (and banned) single, which he raved about.

I thought The Light Comes from Within was so bad it must have been a spoof. Bob ranted on about the injustice of the BBC banning this single. Apparently it didn't occur to him that the BBC banned it because they wanted to keep their listeners.

But Bob did his one hundred a four point nine shows, and off he went, having played some tedious music, and prematurely reporting the death of Ian Dury. And XFM slowly got its shit together, restored some of the specialist shows and removed the softer songs from the playlist. The playlist is still far too short, of course, but apart from Monday-Friday 2pm-4pm, are you really going to put Radio One on?