Once Chris Moyles spoke to millions on the radio. Now he’s struggling for an audience on his own YouTube channel

Chris Moyles didn’t exactly build his career on the concept of being quiet. He was loud on Radio 1 for more than a decade; he was loud on TV, loud on novelty records, loud through books, loud on stage. But after leaving the Radio 1 breakfast show he was curiously quiet. Initially, it felt as if he was biding his time, waiting for the right moment to announce his big deal with a new radio network. Then it seemed like there might not be a big deal.

Now, two years since he left Radio 1, Chris Moyles has decided to become a YouTube star. You can see his logic: this is what all the kids are doing in 2014. YouTube is where Radio 1 seems to source all its new talent. If making YouTube videos makes normal kids famous, imagine what it could do for someone who is already famous!

Now in its eighth week, A Week in the Life of Chris Moyles is a series of five-to-10-minute vlogs that offer a glimpse behind the scenes of his existence.

Sadly for fans of the one-time self-proclaimed Saviour of Radio 1, this new venture is not going well. His first video achieved a modest 30,000 views, and within two months he’s lost almost two-thirds of that audience. To put it another way, he’s reaching less than 0.2% of the audience he took for granted just two years ago. It’s hard to imagine the established YouTube community, whose leading lights easily hit more than 1m views with each video, quaking in its boots; Tyler Oakley, Troye Sivan, Smosh and Zoella are not, it’s fair to assume, holding nightly crisis talks.

Two years ago, Moyles could afford not to worry about indifference – he had seven million listeners on his side, drowning out the criticism. A support network of 10,000 viewers provides rather less insulation.

So what’s the problem, and how can he turn it around? Well, first off, the “content” – that cherished umbrella term for all creative endeavour in these popcultural end times – is not compelling. A week in the life of Chris Moyles might have been interesting five years ago but showbiz pals, so numerous during Moyles’s time on the country’s biggest pop station, are now curiously sparse. By his seventh vlog, the special showbiz guest was Mitch Johnson, introduced as the man who did the voiceovers on Live & Kicking, 13 years ago.

The big YouTubers treat their audience as equals, but Moyles does not see things this way, and in a medium that cherishes transparency, his approach is unconvincing. Often, it just doesn’t make sense. One running gag is that Moyles will break off mid-sentence to address someone off-camera. Chatting to an imaginary producer is a well-worn TV trope. It works on TV because those programmes actually have producers. Moyles’s video blogs are one man in a room, talking to himself. On Radio 1, he might have made those asides to a studio full of chortling chums, but the imaginary producer gag only highlights the sense of solitude that engulfs some of these videos. YouTube’s best solo stars create a sense of intimacy in their videos. Moyles just looks lonely.

The problem at the heart of these videos is that Moyles doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself. On the radio, he sounded as if he was having the time of his life. Two years ago, you would never have accused him of lacking confidence; in 2014, there’s defeat in his eyes. The creative, anarchic spirit that once characterised his well-defined radio features has evaporated: reading out and rebutting the previous week’s YouTube comments and recklessly deriding an already dwindling viewer base is not exactly Carpark Catchphrase.

There are those who will revel in Moyles’s apparent career nosedive. Among them are the women who were marginalised by his ladbantz, the gay men who were derided on air, and all those deemed less important than Moyles, each steamrollered by his on- and off-air persona.

But if they can forgive, and if they can view this failed YouTube experiment as ample punishment and a chance for lessons to be learned, what could Moyles do next? Plenty of former Radio 1 names – Bruno Brookes, Gary Davies, Mark Goodier – ended up reinventing themselves behind the scenes of the entertainment industry. Moyles is managed by a company founded by former Radio 1 star Peter Powell.

But, for now at least, that feels like a waste of a talented broadcaster. In a recent vlog, Moyles announced that he had no plans to get back into radio. Actually, this is exactly what he should do. Away from radio, he seems powerless. The man who once appeared on Radio 1 promotional posters dressed as Superman has found himself trapped on Krypton. On YouTube – where the visual vernacular was defined by trailblazers less than half his age – Moyles is out of his comfort zone. But on the radio, he proved himself to be an instinctive broadcaster whose technical proficiency put him miles ahead of the increasing number of DJs (or hosts) who had been sourced from youth TV shows.

Former Radio 1 Breakfast Show nuisance Chris Evans managed to reinvent himself as a Radio 2 Breakfast Show host. There were dark times in between, but it worked out in the end, and Moyles left Radio 1 a different man from the one who had joined in the late 90s. The party-animal imbecile persona had been mellowed by age and a metropolitan lifestyle.

Perhaps nobody wanted to work with him. Perhaps, with hindsight, Moyles can now accept that he should have behaved differently towards those who were once below him, and now tower above him. In 2012, it seemed as if he could have walked into a show on Capital, or even LBC, whether anyone liked him or not. But two years is a long time to be doing nothing, and the reconstruction of his career must surely start with the end of A Week in the Life of Chris Moyles. The show might have seemed better than doing nothing. Actually, it’s far worse.