Hurry if you want to be controller of Radio 2

If you fancy the job of controller of BBC Radio 2, vacated by Lesley Douglas after the Ross/Brand fiasco, hurry. Interviews take place later this week. The bad news is that there is likely to be little appetite for a maverick candidate, so if your main platform is more exposure for the music of Jess Conrad, or Brian Sewell to double-head the breakfast show with Jade Goody, you may lose out to an established BBC heavyweight. The industry expects the motorcycle-riding, fiftysomething Radio 1 controller Andy Parfitt, or Five Live's former boss, Bob Shennan, who left for Channel 4's ill-fated digital radio project, to be chosen from a slew of candidates for what is undoubtedly the best job in British radio.

Who would not want it? Your raw material is the entire back catalogue of every popular music artiste of the past 50 years, uninterrupted by commercials, and while money might not be flowing quite as freely as in the Douglas years, you still have a guaranteed income from the licence fee.

On the other hand, this is not absolutely the best time to assume the mantle. In many ways, it will be like taking over a team that has just won back-to-back Premier League titles. In terms of audience figures, Sony awards, and public esteem, Radio 2 has been phenomenally successful under Douglas and her predecessor Jim Moir.

When I worked at Radio 2, from 1985 to 1996, it was something you kept quiet about, to avoid being shunned by friends and acquaintances. Douglas and Moir, though, successfully buried the network's pipe-and-slippers image and now there are fresh, and far trickier, challenges ahead for the new boss.

As discussed here before, the BBC runs three national popular music channels - Radios 1, 2, and 6 Music - out of the public purse, and all do more or less the same thing during daylight hours when the audience is at its largest.

While there may be some difference in tone between, say, Wogan and Chris Moyles, they are essentially doing the same job, occasionally even playing the same tunes. In the good times, that would be an issue only for commercial radio bosses trying to turn a buck in a difficult marketplace, but, unless I misread public opinion, we now want to feel our licence fee is being more creatively and imaginatively spent.

Clearly, I am not alone in that view. The 1,200-word notice advertising the controller's job is studded with words such as "diverse" and "distinctive", (which occurs twice in the first 60-word paragraph).

Whereas previous controllers were charged with building Radio 2's audience up from a fairly dismal level - for which I take no personal responsibility - it falls to the new boss, who also takes charge of 6 Music, to convince a newly sceptical public that the two networks are providing value for our money.

I do not sense much of an appetite for privatising the BBC's pop music networks, given the carnage that might cause among existing commercial stations, in the current economic climate. But it does mean that Radios 1 and 2 need to justify themselves as distinctive publicly-funded stations, rather than aggressive competitors for commercial radio.

In that context, I read the job description as a licence to make Radio 2 less populist and therefore possibly less popular. But it's a delicate balance. Radio 2 cannot afford to lose too much of its audience, or the same issues that surfaced in the 80s, questioning the point of the station, will re-emerge. And all this has to be managed against the backdrop of the imminent retirement of the network's most popular act, Terry Wogan. Which is why I shall not be running round today with my application.