When Terry Wogan died, much was made of his intimate broadcasting technique, how he made his radio shows seem personal by deliberately talking to one listener. The listener singular, rather than plural. Chris Moyles does not make radio like this.

“No,” he says. “I see it for what it is, people tuning in to listen in on a conversation. It’s a lovely idea, the idea of talking to your one listener, but it’s not what I do. Although, with Radio X, we could say we’re talking to one listener. We could almost name them… ”

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He’s joking, of course, but, like most of Moyles’s jokes, there is a kick. He works for new station Radio X as its breakfast show host, and the day before we meet, the show’s first ever Rajar (Radio Joint Audience Research) figures are released. These figures, which you think would be straightforward – how hard is it to find out how many people listen to a radio programme? – are actually notoriously tricky to understand, a car crash of information and jargon. Before I meet Moyles, I exchange emails with Radio X’s press officer to try to make head or tail of what the figures might mean. It takes 10 emails to work it out.

So here you go. I can reveal that the total number of listeners to Chris Moyles’s Radio X breakfast show is… 300,000. But this number is only made up of Londoners who listen on FM. For some reason, Rajar hasn’t got any digital results yet, so when national digital listeners are added, this figure will rise. Plus, Radio X broadcasts on FM in Manchester too, and at some point these listeners will be counted as well. The show’s podcast has clocked up 1.6 million listeners so far, according to iTunes. Let’s say 300,000 for now, and check back in a few months.

Some people have already made their mind up about you, and whatever it is they want to say, they’re going to say it

Despite Moyles’s joke, the Rajar figures are fine, by the way. The station’s owner, Global Radio, is happy. The figures are up on the station’s previous breakfast show (when it was Xfm), and people are listening for longer. Anyhow, Radio X does not seem destined for massive numbers. It sells itself on middle-of-the-road indie music, an ageing interest; it’s a relaunch, of Xfm, and relaunches take ages to settle with the public. X is not Heart, or Capital, not even 6 Music. And it’s certainly not Radio 1.

Moyles, of course, will always be associated with Radio 1. He was a presenter there for 15 years, more than eight of them on the breakfast show, making him the station’s longest-serving breakfast DJ. From the start, he was cocky and gobby – and an instant hit, taking the listener numbers up by a million in his first three months, hitting 7.7 million at his peak. No wonder he sees 300,000 listeners as nothing. Does he worry about the competition?

“Well, when I was at Radio 1, I had the same competition I’ve got now – everybody from Capital to XFM. And when you’re on in the morning, everything’s competition. Having a lie-in is competition, putting the telly on is competition, getting the bus, not having enough 3G – everything is competition. You can drive yourself mad thinking about it, or just do what you do – get a good show.”

It was at Radio 1 that Moyles perfected his un-Wogan-ish broadcasting approach, which consists of him in a studio with three or four other people, chatting to one another about silly things. Less cosy whispering to one listener, more Radio Pub. He stole this technique, he says, from American shock jock Howard Stern, another rude radio iconoclast. Moyles is a broadcasting nerd, and he can remember the first time he heard Stern, at the home of a friend in the US. Despite not knowing anyone on the show (“not Robin or Fred, or Jackie” – he remembers the regulars’ names), he was instantly hooked.

“There were a lot of people talking, and I didn’t know who any of them were,” he says. “But it didn’t alienate me. It pulled me in enough that I wanted to know more, like why that joke about Robin was funny. I didn’t understand, but I listened every day for a week, and by the end of the week I was totally hooked. And there’s a mentality of that on my show. Rather than explain everything, just let people try and work it out.”

For me, this makes his show more fitting for Radio X than his previous employers. Moyles’s references were always a bit risque for Radio 1’s 15- to-24-year-old target audience; and at the Reithian BBC, letting young people try to work stuff out just wasn’t an option. Moyles was constantly having to justify himself, putting his foot in it, saying unacceptable things.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Moyles in action during his Radio 1 breakfast show years. Photograph: BBC

One of the most notorious incidents was in 2006, when he used “gay” as a derogatory term. He gets a bit upset when I bring this up, because, he protests, he doesn’t even remember saying it. (It was in a discussion about ringtones. He said: “I don’t want that one, it’s gay.”) It was a quick line in a long show, and he and his team didn’t pick up on its significance. He wasn’t told that a complaint had been made, nor that it had been discussed by a BBC panel. He wasn’t even informed of the panel’s decision (a clumsy one: the panel pronounced that young people do use “gay” in a disparaging way, so Moyles was fine to do the same. Of course, this only extended the controversy).

Today, Moyles likens what happened to a comedian’s standup show; specifically, Jimmy Carr’s. Carr got very heated when a line of his was quoted as an example of bigotry. Carr said that yes, that was exactly what he said, but the context had been completely removed, the build-up, the journey of performer and audience.

Though I don’t think this is a perfect analogy (Carr’s shows are carefully scripted, Moyles made an off-the-cuff remark), and I don’t think Moyles should have said it, I have some sympathy. His audience knew him well, he had a gay producer on air with him for ages and it is almost impossible to do a live show like the Radio 1 breakfast show for more than eight years without screwing up at some point. He says: “I was very, very naive through a lot of my Radio 1 time. I genuinely thought everybody got what I did – that maybe they didn’t like what I did, but they understood it. They’d got that it was all a joke. But they didn’t.”

Part of the problem, of course, was Moyles’s reputation. He’s tagged as a bit of a caveman. His two, awful biographies didn’t do much to disabuse anyone of this notion (lots of comments about “boobs” and “racks”), and he once said he’d take Charlotte Church’s virginity when she turned 16, but in real life, he doesn’t come over as such a horrible git. A bit old-fashioned in how he often comments on people’s gender or sexuality, but not discriminatory.

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“I’m not homophobic, but what can I say about that?” he says. “Whatever I say sounds like ‘some of my best friends are black’. Christ almighty, one of my best friends came out a couple of years ago as transgender. Simon is now Steph, which is fine. But I don’t know what to say about that. Because if I say the wrong thing, I’ll be crucified in Leicester Square.”

Leicester Square is where Radio X is, of course. And – argh! – despite only being three months old, it too has managed to create its own non-PC controversies. Before it was even launched, the station became associated with an idea – probably a marketing ploy – that it was going to be a geezers’ station: “male-focused”, a place where women were not welcome. This seemed confirmed by its presenter signings: Moyles at breakfast, Vernon Kaye for mornings, Johnny Vaughan hosting the tea-time show. All three are experienced broadcasters, but their appeal is Old Lad; ’90s fellers who don’t act their age.

Moyles found the whole thing exasperating, but experience told him – and this was borne out – that “really quickly it was out of my hands. It should never have been said, and I never said it, but after a while, it’s nothing to do with me any more, because everyone else has run off with it and now they’re discussing sexism in the media, and sexism in the workplace, and should women get paid the same, it’s just gone off.” He went out of his way on his first show to say that it was nonsense. “You just have to roll your eyes and say, ‘We’re really not a Yorkie bar for radio’.”

He lights another cigarette. He loves a smoke, does Moyles. We’re sitting outside a nice pub in Highgate, so he can happily chuff on. It’s the afternoon. He’s already done his show and been to the gym and after we speak, he’s going to do some more training. Running. Is he going for a marathon? I wonder. But no. “This is all just to stop me being a fat bastard. It’s hard work.” Moyles has cleaned up his act when it comes to his appearance. He’s spruce in his leather jacket and jeans, and he smells nice. He’s also more charming than you might imagine – almost flirty – and disconcertingly focused on me and my life. I think he’d be a lot more comfortable if he were asking the questions. After about an hour, he actively tries to interview me.

He is definitely jumpy about the press. Determined to keep some parts of his life private, he brings the shutters down when I ask him questions he doesn’t like. His eyes, dark brown and unreadable at the best of times, turn almost black. This happens when I ask him about his old chum, “Comedy” Dave Vitty.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Moyles and Ronan Keating climb Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief in 2009. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Comic Relief/Getty Images

Comedy Dave was Moyles’s sidekick at Radio 1 for 14 years, starting as his broadcasting assistant, ending up as producer/contributor and funniest foil; he and Moyles racked up the longest ever continuous show – 52 hours of non-stop broadcasting – for Comic Relief in 2011 (their record has been beaten since). I listened to, then watched, that programme on the BBC red button, and it was a genuine tour de force. One of Moyles’s compadres told me she couldn’t believe that he could still drive the desk – work all the right buttons – on no sleep at all. “Actually,” says Moyles when I bring this up, “at one point I was looking for the golden hour jingle and I just stared at the screen. It was in the same place as it always is, with big letters that said GOLDEN HOUR, but I just couldn’t see it.”

Anyway, Comedy Dave. He has not come with Moyles to Radio X, though other Radio 1 regulars have (newsman Dominic Byrne, producer Pippa Taylor Hackett). Dave – who now co-owns a successful TV production company – has been replaced by another bloke called Dave.

The big falling out between the two supposedly occurred when original Dave split up with his wife, Jayne Sharp, and Moyles was photographed soon after with Sharp, apparently on holiday. He and Dave were still working on the radio show together every morning at the time. Some have said that the Radio 1 bigwigs were so worried about the Moyles-Dave on-air situation that they hurried Nick Grimshaw into the breakfast show slot a year earlier than planned. This hasn’t been verified, but Moyles and Dave had separate leaving parties.

When I ask about Dave, it becomes clear that there was – is – a problem. Moyles freezes and becomes almost monosyllabic. Did he not come to Radio X with you because you went on holiday with his ex-wife? I ask. “That’s what people have said.”

I’ve never really wanted to get married, and I’ve never really wanted to have kids.

I push him a bit more and he says: “We haven’t spoken in a while. It’s no one’s business, but everyone’s business. The last time we spoke it was, ‘Good luck.’ ‘And you.’ All that. ‘Wish you all the best.’ ‘And yourself.’ ‘Thanks, pal.’ So… that’s it. That’s all I’ll say on that.”

The other time I get short shrift is when I ask him about his current love situation. He has a girlfriend, he confirms, but she doesn’t live with him (she doesn’t live in London) and she isn’t “in the business”. So it’s not actor Aiobhinn McGinnity then, as the tabloids seemed to think. He seems happy enough with his domestic set-up and doesn’t really want it to get more serious or traditional. He went on record ages ago saying that he’d rather have an iPod than a child; today, he says, “maybe an iPhone 7”.

“I’ve never really wanted to get married,” he says, “and I’ve never really wanted to have kids.” Does that limit you with women? “No, my face limits me with women,” he says. The joke with the kick. “Of course it’s true! It used to be true.”

“Look,” he says, “you get chastised for saying, ‘I’m too selfish to have kids,’ because people think it’s a cop-out. But the reality is, with all my friends that have kids, I don’t see them much any more, because they don’t have a minute left in the day. They’re permanently tired, it is a full-time job looking after children, and they are also trying to keep down a real full-time job, as well as everything else that everybody has to do, and I genuinely don’t know how they do it. Because I’m so used to my life. I’m like, ‘How would I cope?’”

This sounds like the boy who won’t grow up, but he insists he has. After he left Radio 1 in 2012, he went straight into rehearsals for Jesus Christ Superstar, as Herod, and the experience had a strong effect on him. For a start, it jolted him out of what he calls “the youth bubble” of Radio 1: he met performers who didn’t know who he was; 23-year-olds who called him grandad. And he met Tim Minchin, who was playing Judas, and they became great pals. Minchin, a musician, comedian, singer, writer and songwriter, seemed to inspire Moyles. “Tim said, ‘I just do what I want to do’ and I thought, ‘That’s what I want.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Moyles as Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar in 2012, with Tim Minchin, Ben Forster and and Melanie C. Photograph: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images

But what did he want to do? Well, after the Superstar tour was over, he wrote a pilot episode of a sitcom, about a washed-up radio host who wasn’t on radio any more and had no money and had to share a flat. He wrote far too much and the BBC turned it down, but he went to Los Angeles and met a few people who were encouraging, and since then he’s written three film screenplays and two sitcoms. He finds it hard – he doesn’t enjoy the planning, just wants to start writing dialogue – but “my writing’s got better, and they’re all just sitting there, these scripts. It’s not like it’s been a massive waste of my time, it’s just not been very lucrative.”

We move on to money. He once berated the BBC on air for not paying him. He says to me that he did this to divert attention from the fact that he’d been late three times to his show: he was splitting up with his long-term girlfriend, Sophie Waite, and was living in a hotel (“very Alan Partridge”). Still, it worked and he was paid. He’s witty about this, but then I ask him about being involved in a tax avoidance scheme, and he gets frustrated again. He gives me a very long explanation that boils down to: he thought it was OK and it turned out it wasn’t and he paid it back in full.

Moyles’s past will always dog him, but perhaps, now he’s older and less obsessed with what he thinks is cool, he won’t be putting his foot in his never-quiet mouth quite so much. He had two years off before Radio X came calling and it seems to have calmed him down. Plus, he’s 42 on Monday. Emma Freud once told him that he’s a decade late with his life (“I like that, because it sounds like an actual answer, where everyone else would just go, ‘You’re just immature’”), and he feels like he’s in his 30s, but hitting 40 has had an effect. He still drinks – he’s never taken drugs – but he stops when “I’m rubbing the inside of my bottom teeth with my tongue”. His life is streamlined, so that he only does radio, keeps fit, sees his girlfriend and writes. He’s considering a tattoo: either MLC (for midlife crisis), or a shamrock, to honour his Irish heritage.

And he still does his radio show, which he is loving. He loves radio, full stop. He gives me a whole spiel on why Steve Wright is amazing, on what he gets from Nick Abbot on LBC, how he listened to Jamie Theakston and Emma Bunton on Heart when he wasn’t on a breakfast show. He guides me to a new podcast, made by a cousin of his in Dublin. He’s a loyal employee: when he was on Radio 1, he listened to Radio 1. Now, he’s tuned to Radio X, listening to Johnny Vaughan while running.

Plus he has done this interview to promote his show. “I don’t really do interviews any more because it’s just pointless,” he says. “I don’t really get anything out of it. Some people have already made their mind up about you, and whatever it is they want to say, they’re going to say it. I did a piece once, years ago, and when it came out, she was really snide. And right at the end, she goes, ‘He’s actually all right though.’ And you go, ‘You know what? What can I do?’ You can’t change people’s opinions.

“I’m on the radio, everything is turned up and heightened, and I’m trying to make people laugh for three and a half hours a day, five days a week. I say things that are a bit silly, and I’ve said things that are mistakes. But… it’s an act. You know, like Keith Lemon is an act. When the Daily Mail would constantly have a go at me, I’d be like, ‘But it’s not for you. It’s not for your readers. It’s like complaining that a library doesn’t sell sausages.’ But it doesn’t make any difference. I just get pinned for it.”

He takes a breath. “Yeah, I know. Boo fucking hoo.”

The Chris Moyles Show is on Radio X, weekdays 6.30-10am