This year radio became more like television, with the emphasis on money rather than programmes. Talk Radio secured the ball-by-ball rights to the cricket Tests, and Digital One launched the first national digital radio services before the BBC had even finalised its own. But with so few digital sets sold, and the two new stations offering the choice of old hits or new, the prospect of rapid, wide take-up doesn't seem great, though five new digital services are set to launch early in the year.
An edgy pre-millennial peace has hovered over the BBC's national networks this year, although Greg Dyke's plan to reduce bureaucracy should have a salutary effect on radio.
On Radio 1 Zoë Ball announced her forthcoming retirement from the Breakfast Show and was replaced by her old mate Sara Cox. Mid-morning also seems in need of a refit. Radio 1's chief competition comes from big commercial stations like Capital rather than the national Virgin, where Chris Evans is discovering that a station isn't a programme and needs more than one star.
Radio 2, judged best radio station of the year in the Sony awards, remains a feast constantly replenished by controller Jim Moir, winning extra kudos for initially refusing to play Sir Cliff's Millennium Prayer. Jimmy Young played it the other day, yet unaccountably failed to point out that it sounds like one of those impossible combinations in which Willie Rushton used to specialise on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue - like farting to the tune of On Ilkley Moor Ba'ht 'At.
On 3, Roger Wright has increasingly concentrated on high culture, with more live music and arts programming, and dispensed with some (though, alas, not all) of his predecessor's blandest innovations. But then being controller of Radio 3 under supportive Jenny Abramsky is quite a different undertaking than was required of poor Nick Kenyon, pushed by Matthew Bannister to increase his audience at any cost. Kenyon, meanwhile, continues to construct glittering seasons as director of the Proms.
Radio 4 is sounding more settled, but still feels as if its quality has been thinned, its budgets stretched, and imagination given its cards. In place of matronly home counties voices are even worse young omni-media ones, whose scripts sound as if they've rolled off the BBC's central computer. Worst is You and Yours, which went truly tabloid the day after Cherie Blair's pregnancy was announced and brought in Esther Rantzen and a journalist from a women's magazine to rhapsodise about older mothers. Radio 5's energy and confidence continue, while Kelvin MacKenzie's Talk is losing listeners, despite its lively Big Boys Breakfast, with non-sports enthusiasts deserting its afternoon and early evening Sportszone as, ahem, we said they would.
BBC local radio, meanwhile, produced "Europe's largest oral history initiative", The Century Speaks, full of splendid local testimony, although the few programmes I've heard seemed to confirm rather than challenge current thinking about the century's drift.
Over at Classic FM, new controller Roger Lewis's imprint has yet to be made strongly on air.
But still there were memorable programmes. The most exciting series of talks I heard was tucked away, virtually unbilled and unpromoted, on Sunday night on Radio 4. John Gray's analysis of the impact of the fall of communism and of globalisation, Now That History Hasn't Ended, was brilliantly written. The series needs repeating urgently.
Radio 5 Live's Sunday Service cocks more and more snooks at politicians, and continues to find intriguing new takes on the world. Musically, I've continued to enjoy Gilles Peterson's eclectic Radio 1 Worldwide show, while Radio 3's fabulously adventurous Late Junction has been an instant success. On Classic FM Roger Lewis's signing of the informed and entertaining Natalie Wheen has shown a path he could take the station down if he dares.
As for drama, Lesley Bruce's delicious Vanilla (Radio 4) exploited radio's skill with the grotesque but never overegged it, while Kate Rowland directed a brilliant Radio 3 production of Frozen Images, a searing Finnish play about poverty. And among the adaptations of stage plays, particularly effective were Tom Stoppard's gloriously probing and witty The Invention of Love, and Dave Batchelor and Giles Havergal's devastating version of Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind (both on Radio 3).
I was quite depressed about the state of British radio before I started writing this. But there now - I've quite cheered myself up.
