To say John Peel had a lot of records is rather like saying Kate Moss is photographed quite often. His collection of vinyl albums alone exceeded 25,000 — which doesn’t include CDs. Then there are the 12in and 7in singles, as well as the countless demo tapes sent in by young hopefuls. One tiny corner of this audio empire, however, remained under strict martial law: his “record box”. At his feet in his home studio lay a sturdy wooden box in which he stored the 7in singles that meant the most to him. At the time of his death last year, this immensely personal collection numbered just 142 three-minute slices of pop. It was the thing he would carry with him if his house burnt down — records he clearly felt he couldn’t live without.

Now his son Tom Ravenscroft has helped put together a documentary based on the contents of this battered crate. Many of the artists included gush about their pride at being there, but such hubris should be tempered by the knowledge that, for example, Peel’s beloved Fall were absent only because they merited an entire shelf to themselves in Peel Acres.

The first thing that strikes you about the full list is how little of the grinding dark-core, impenetrable electronica and twisted ultra-noise that he loved to champion — “The unpleasant and disorientating racket”, as he once described it — actually found its way into his heart. There’s a lot of old-school soul there, such as Eddie & Ernie, OV Wright, Johnnie Taylor and Ann Peebles, and plenty of reggae: Lee Perry, Andy Capp, Blood Fire Posse and Izzy Royal. Indeed, if a theme emerges, it’s that he truly loved music that was simple. He seems to have had a bit of a thing about two-piece outfits, or raw, basic tracks with straightforward lyrics: Al Casey’s Surfin’ Hootenanny, five Charlie Feathers singles, Don French’s Lonely Saturday Night and an astonishing 12 tracks by the White Stripes.

The programme makes much of this, arguing that the White Stripes represented everything Peel loved, but when I meet the quietly spoken Ravenscroft, he isn’t so sure. “The only reason for so many White Stripes singles is that they were his latest band,” he says. “In another 12 months, there may not have been any White Stripes at all.”

Ravenscroft, it is touching to note, often speaks about his father in the present tense. “I think half these singles are stuff that meant a lot to him, because he’s had a box of 7-inches before this,” he explains. “He lost one in the States and one in Amsterdam, so some of the records are things he’d been trying to get back. Now he has them back, he wanted to make sure he didn’t lose them again.”

Of course, Teenage Kicks is there, perhaps the epitome of stripped-down pop. “The entire box is about teenagers getting their kicks,” says Billy Bragg. “That’s what Peel did: he played music for teenagers to get their kicks by. When he died, it was his show on Radio 1 that had the largest teenage audience.”

There is a great, secret pleasure in that. The idea that, for all the millions that ad-land, publishers, record companies, television stations and radio-playlist compilers spend on focus groups and posters, it was a grumpy-sounding man with a beard and incomprehens-ible taste who pulled in the largest teenage audience at Britain’s national pop-music station.

“That’s always been the case, throughout his career,” Ravenscroft confirms. “I don’t quite know why — perhaps because he has a childish way of listening to new things. The thing he enjoys most in the world is hearing something he’s never heard before. And when you’re a teenager, everyone spends their life talking down to you. You’re a nuisance. People listened to him because he didn’t patronise them. He spoke to teenagers as if they were adults — as they wanted to be spoken to.

“For me, the great thing about working on this programme was that, before it was commissioned, I hadn’t listened to that many of the records in the box,” he says. “We’d heard a lot on tapes when we drove round France — the Golinski Brothers’ Bloody and Popatop, especially — but now I’ve heard the rest, a lot have become my favourite records ever. Eddie & Ernie’s Time Waits for No One: the first five seconds of that is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. And Medicine Head’s His Guiding Hand is gorgeous.

“If I tried to listen to every record in the collection, even if I spent every day for the rest of my life doing it, I could never get through them all. So the fact that he’s pulled a few out for me is a blessing.”

John Peel’s Record Box is on Channel 4 on November 14 at 11pm. The list of 142 singles is at www.timesonline.co.uk/music

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