Howard Stern, the richest and filthiest man in the history of radio, was interviewed on Radio 4 yesterday morning by Martin Bashir. The title of the programme was The Best DJ You’ve Never Heard in Your Life, the second half of which would have been true for most British listeners, as Stern broadcasts only in America. The adjective “best” we can ascribe to the BBC’s quirky sense of humour, since Stern is the archetypal shock jock, whose shows are notorious for obscenity, phone sex, on-air defecation, audible flatulence and other unpleasantness.

Some listeners may recall the 1997 film Private Parts, in which Stern played himself as an outspoken outlaw standing up against the prudes. But few would have realised until Bashir’s report that the reason why Stern is as rich as Croesus is not just the traditional one – where there’s muck, there’s brass – but also because he is now on satellite.

After the most recent of his many fines for lewdness, in 2004, Stern was dumped by his then employers. He signed up with Sirius, one of the USA’s two satellite radio operators (its rival but imminent merger partner, XM, is the one that carries Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour), and started with them on a salary of £50m a year. In addition, he was paid an estimated £40m bonus for boosting Sirius’s subscriber base from 662,000 in late 2004 to 3.3m only a year later. He has helped double its share price. Subscribers pay about £8 a month for commercial-free shows, plus the cost of a receiver. Stern is, crucially, now free from federal-broadcasting decency laws.

Could it take off here? There are at least two points worth making. First, there is no novelty in Britain as regards commercial-free radio: the BBC has been doing this for 80 years, and you have to go far back to find a time when it did not have the majority of radio listening in Britain. Second, satellite radio is ideally suited to areas of vast distances and sparse population, which is why it has taken hold in the USA and parts of Africa and Asia. Europe has relatively small distances and a dense population, which is why it is more suited to FM and AM and their digital updatings in DAB and DRM respectively.

Stern, 53, revels in his outrageousness, but he also has enormous drive, coupled with an imaginative approach in the actual delivery of the output. And he is not alone in combining those last two qualities: look at Michael Pasternak, aka Emperor Rosko. The son of the Hollywood producer Joe Pasternak, he was heard hosting the noon show on Radio 1 on its opening day in 1967, but was actually in Paris, sending it down the line to Broadcasting House.

Today, Rosko is back on British radio in quite a big way. Less than a month before he turns 65, he has a Saturday show on Big L (heard on Sky, online and 1395 medium wave) and a Sunday show on Aston FM, which covers the whole of Birmingham. He will also present a Christmas Day special on BBC Radio Essex, where he appeared this summer to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of the pirate ships. He still has the same passion for Motown and rock, the same extraordinary energy and motormouth dexterity, and all his shows now come by download from his home in Los Angeles. Maybe the Americans have something to teach us after all.

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