THIS is the final episode of stint in this column, so, in keeping with the est broadcasting tradition. I would like to repeat myself.

The state of our radio is getting worse and worse, and it doesn't have to be like that. Ten, fifteen years ago, we had better choice and depth of quality in radio programming than we have today. That was before we became concerned with giving people "what they want". In those bad old days, Dublin city had a choice between dozens of radio stations offering a range of music choices from classical to country. Today, the only choice is between two forms of blandness.

I attended the hearings eight years ago at which licences were allocated to the two stations now operating legally in Dublin, and all of the things those hearings appeared anxious to avoid have become the essence of radio in Dublin. RTE, under pressure from changed market conditions, has diluted its programming to compete in the same marketplace.

If you go by what people say they want, you end up pleasing nobody. This is because people always confuse wants with needs. It's a bit like asking a child what he wants for his dinner. His ideal choice may be cream cakes. But if you give him cream cakes for his dinner every day for a month, he will eventually kill you for the key to the vegetable cupboard.

Or, take RTE Radio One. Once upon a time, in the days before market obsession destroyed everything, Radio One was shaping up to be a grand little radio station, attempting a decent, all round service on limited resources.

Its morning service was decent square meal radio. You could hear serious interviews at 9.15 a.m. on the Mike Murphy Show and current affairs analysis at 11 on Day by Day. In between was Gay Byrne, who did his own thing.

The schedule had a variety of tones and textures as might be considered consistent with a public service ethic. This was not the result of market research or audience response analysis, but of people sitting down and resolving the question of how best to provide the public with a mix of information, analysis and entertainment. Each element was separate and distinct, and worked in quite a different way.

Mike Murphy, who could act the fool as well as anyone, put on his intelligent voice once the 9 o'clock news was over. When he would interview politicians or writers or artists, he would not attempt to boost audiences by asking them about their private lives, but concentrated on those things which were relevant to their public life and work. These interviews had a particular character, which has never been recaptured.

Then they started to mess around. What the controllers at Radio One seem unable to grasp is that it is not necessary that every single person in the country he listening to the station all the time. Because The Gay Byrne Show was consistently delivering the best audiences, everything and everyone had to be turned into Gay Byrne. Day by Day was scrapped, Byrne's slot extended in both scope and time, Pat Kenny drafted in to do something similar and Morning Ireland introduced to give us current affairs for breakfast. The result was that the idiosyncratic character of the schedule was sacrificed for a continuous and competitive orgy of talking.

People were being given what they said they wanted. For a while they seemed grateful and satisfied. But then local radio came along and some of these ingrates were actually listening to it.

At first, RTE management expressed its concern as puzzled condescension. In one response to a survey showing that local radio had whipped the socks off the national station, one RTE manager dismissed the local stations as "wall to wall death notices and country and western".

RTE seemed to have no answer except to capitulate to the market. Losing listeners, they took steps which lost them even more listeners, and now seem determined to wipe out their audience completely. The recently proposed changes to the Radio One schedule make one pale in disbelief.

The announcement of the schedule employed words like "upbeat" and "light hearted" - euphemisms for knowing nonsense. The decision to replace Gay Byrne on Mondays and Tuesday with a 2FM type disc jockey displays a staggering failure to understand what people want, need or expect from the national radio channel. The scapegoating of Joe Duffy, by far the most innovative and interesting broadcaster for a generation, is an ominous indicator of the direction in which we are headed.

Although grossly misused by efforts to fit him into Gay Byrne's shoes, Joe Duffy managed to deliver radio which was entertaining, challenging and democratic. In the kind of radio he was providing lies the seed of a whole new texture and approach, but nobody seems in the slightest bit interested in seeing it grow.