Johnny Vaughan, Capital 95.8's motor-mouthed breakfast show host is no fan of Rajar the official body in charge of measuring audience figures in the UK.
"If I understood the ratings or had any faith in them at all I would be delighted if we had won. They are complete c**p to everyone and are not even vaguely representative," he told me on Monday, shortly after coming off air with Denise van Outen following their first radio show together.

He added: "If you were wandering round London and handing out diaries for people to fill in what radio station they listen to, where would you go? A housing estate in Deptford or a really nice cul de sac in Ealing. Most people say, 'ooh yes, Radio 4 I listen to Radio 4', and they never listen - its just what people say. People just lie. I have no faith whatsoever in the system so I don't care where it places us."
Perhaps Vaughan's dismissive attitude to the Rajars is not a surprise, given that the release of their official stats every three months has, more often than not, spelt bad news for him and Capital since he took over the coveted slot from Chris Tarrant.
Back in June 2004, Vaughan's first Rajar saw an immediate decline of 400,000 listeners and the 41 year-old has seen a few ups and even more downs since as he continued to fight for the audience share against the likes of Radio One's Chris Moyles who smugly dubbed his rival 'Johnny Yawn'.

But is there substance to Vaughan's claims that the Rajars are 'not vaguely-representative'? Well Rajar's London stats for the last quarter of 2007 - which put Vaughan in second place (864,000 listeners) behind Jamie and Harriet on Heart FM (915,000 listeners) in the 6-9 am slot - were based on a survey of 4,639 adults.
The polling, a Rajar spokeswoman insists, involves field workers knocking on every second and third door in all London postcodes spread across the year - meaning that a housing estate in Deptford should have indeed fallen into the catchment at some point over the last four quarters.

But the spokeswoman admits there are some areas where improvement is necessary.
"We do our level best to survey all age, socioeconomic and ethnic groups but there are some groups which are under-represented such as 18-35 year-old males.
"Also, Asian women, for example, are more likely to turn down filling out the diaries with a field worker, so that's an area we need to improve on."
Whether Johnny Vaughan's Breakfast Show has had a huge untapped group of listeners in the form of Asian women who are either too shy or too conservative to fill out a survey with a Rajar field worker, we will never know.

But the admission that 18-35 year-old males are under represented goes some way to vindicating Vaughan's argument, particularly as he has lost out to both Heart and Magic in recent months (stations which primarily target older, female listeners).
But what about Vaughan's claim that 'people just lie' thus falsely inflating the figures for cerebral radio such as Radio 4's Today programme?

"Well its easy to be cynical when you are in the media," says the Rajar spokeswoman, "but people genuinely feel that they want to help us when we compile our figures and our findings are as accurate as is humanly possible."
In the ultra-competitive world of radio, the Rajars can make or break careers and have been the difference between a profitable year for a commercial station and one where redundancies become inevitable.

And until Rajar finally bring out a more scientifically-sound way of measuring audiences (they have tested various contraptions), Vaughan's argument seems just as valid as the figures they release.

But later in the year if Capital Breakfast with Johnny and Denise is named as London's top breakast show, it will be interesting to see whether he will still be rubbishing the Rajars.