Staff in Sydney and Melbourne were told this afternoon that Vega is finally moving into permanent retirement and will be replaced from tomorrow with a classic rock station boasting the widely imaginative name Classic Rock.

Announcing the replacement station, DMG Radio Australia assistant group program director Dan Bradley, noted that “the halcyon years of rock were the late 60s, 70s and 80s, so we will be a pure classic rock play”.

Bradley then continued to provide fodder for critics of the staleness of Australian radio by noting that “any four minutes we play Wolfmother is four minutes we could have played Hunters and Collectors or Midnight Oil.”

So nothing even vaguely new or threatening on the schedule, except perhaps for Alice Cooper’s daily radio show which will feature nightly on the station.

The news comes a mere five years after Vega was launched under the banner “One station, all the rock legends”. The station, which cost British company DMG $100 million for the Sydney licence and $56 million in Melbourne, failed to impress listeners with its playlist of tepid rock earning a mere 1.8 percent audience share in Sydney and a 1.2 percent share in Melbourne on its first survey results – things never got much better for the station.

Writing in the Brisbane Times today, Tony Squires, one of the stations original presenters described the station this week as “a spectacularly dumb rock-music jukebox” with the “smallest and narrowest playlist on FM radio in Australia”.

Squires also revealed that piss-taking suggestions make by Shaun Micallef during his time as Vega’s Melbourne breakfast, including the idea that “things I’ve had stuck in my bottom” would be an excellent topic for a talk back discussion, were taken seriously by the station’s desperate and clueless program directors.

In addition to Squires and Micallef, Vega also tried and failed with presenters such as Angela Catterns, Wendy Harmer, Mikey Robbins, Rebecca Wilson, Denise Scott, Francis Leach and Ian ‘Dicko’ Dickson.