Radio head: Tom Ravenscroft

This week saw the anniversary of John Peel's death, six years ago on Monday. He was often mentioned in the campaign to save 6Music, a station many regard as encapsulating his spirit of musical adventure. It seems right and proper, then, that his son Tom Ravenscroft should have ended up at 6Music: he took over the Friday night 9pm-midnight slot in June and has made it a thing of utter delight.

He has also made it very much his own terrain. Sure, there are times when he echoes Peel's intonation so closely that you do a double-take at the radio. In last week's show, he found a second mention of a birthday in a listener text. "We have another birthday," he said, in the beginnings of a harrumph. "I can see this escalating." He also has his father's likably deadpan tone. "I'm wildly, wildly excited," he said of a guest mix from The Black Twig Pickers, sounding a long way from wildly anything.

But it's the music you notice most, with the focus squarely on the brand new. Features include Tom Capsule, where a listener suggests two tracks (one well known, one obscure) and an object from a past year. "I don't really play any music from the 1950s [up until] about eight months ago," he said, claiming not to know much about older music, which surely can't be the case, but cleverly carving out a slightly different territory from his father. Like Peel's show, though, it features bands whose names make you chuckle. "This is Shit Horse," he said, all matter of fact. I also enjoyed Scum of Toytown, a listener choice from 1994.

Ravenscroft's show is a slightly easier listen than his father's, with less of the challenging collisions – new, old, ear-bleedingly raw, devilishly weird – Peel used to concoct. For that, there's the breathtakingly varied Dandelion Radio, official home to the Festive 50. Voting for this year's chart has just opened.