OPRAH Winfrey does a show that is bland, that is boring and adds nothing to the medium. Just like everybody else. Playing it safe. Nobody is stepping out and pushing the envelope. That's why I'm always amazed that people criticise what I do because, isn't it exciting that someone is pushing the envelope?
Stepping outside of things and mixing it up and generating something interesting? Anybody can go on the air and play it safe. To be that to me would be a death sentence."
Whatever else he does, Howard Stern does not play it safe. For nearly 20 years the self-styled "king of all media" has hit drive-time New York in the solar plexus and the jury is still out as to whether he is an unreconstructed suburban lout attesting to all America is trying to hide with his in-your-face brand of scatological and sexual humour, or a very sophisticated manipulator of the mass media, or the Candide of our time.
Four years ago, when he had already broken all records as the most listened to (and the most fined) radio broadcaster in the world, he broke yet another record when his autobiography, Private Paris, became the world's fastest selling book.
Now comes the film, also called Private Parts, a typically self-deprecating reference to Stern's assessment of his own most vulnerable private part which, he happily tells the world, is very small. And Stern's mass of classic teenage neuroses continue to form the bedrock for his hum our and his success.
Now 42, rich and famous, Stern still exhibits the body-language of the gawky teenager, his 6'7" frame stooping apologetically as we shake hands, sunglasses hiding watery blue eyes. (When I ask why he is wearing them in the gloom of his suite in the Dorchester, Hollywood's London hotel of choice, he removes them and apologises: "I'm near-sighted. I thought they looked better than regular ones.")
Howard Stern has always felt awkward. His domineering father was a radio engineer in New York and occasionally young Howard would go with him to the Manhattan studio. ("Shut up, Howard. You're a moron.) These were journeys into another world, a world where the microphone was king, nobody answered back and what you looked like didn't count. "I knew at five years old that I wanted to go onto the radio. In ordinary everyday life I had no ability to function and still don't to this day. I was awfully awkward and shy and uncomfortable and still am, and don't feel particularly secure and never have felt good about myself like I'm some great person. You know bow some people get pumped up.
Like Hollywood stars? Exactly. I mean, what have they really done? They acted in a film. Acting's not so difficult. I've just proved it. If I can do it, anyone can.
After the massive success of the book, Hollywood came running. Stern, who cannily had script approval, rejected the first 22 drafts. "They were awful. They were not funny. It appeared they hadn't read the book. They were making up scenarios. It's like all these Hollywood comedies that come out and they ship them overseas. They embarrass me. They're absolutely boring and dull I said, `Why can't we base this in reality? My life story can be funny. You don't have to make up these things, there are enough anecdotes in the book.'
"They said, `You're afraid to make this movie'. I said, `I assure you I'm not. The problem that I'm having with it is that I'm really embarrassed by these scripts'."
Enter Ivan Reitman, director of Ghostbusters, and a long time fan of Howard Stern. Jackpot. For once, the film of the book is exactly that, losing none of Stern's anarchic voice and humour in the transition from page to screen.
Private Parts is unusual in that Howard Stern plays himself: in fact, most people play themselves, specifically his brains-trust of a team whose wacky on-air personalities (no one remains a backroom boy) belie serious intellectual acuity, not afraid to stick its fingers into every dark crevice of the American underbelly.
The villains of the piece, the station controllers at NBC whose campaign to destroy Stern forms a major strand of the narrative are, inevitably, played by actors. Stern's wife Alison declined to play her on-screen persona. Quite understandably it is an emotionally demanding role that requires an actress (Mary MacCormack). Their brittle but ultimately soft-centred relationship forms the central theme of the movie, and indeed Stern's life. (He has famously remained faithful to Alison from first to last.) Although their relationship appears to have been played out in public - from the details of their sex life (vibrators, masturbation) to the drama of pregnancy and miscarriage - yet the privacy of the family (three daughters) is zealously maintained. They are the safe anchorage from which the buccaneer sets sail on his daily piracy of the politically correct.
Almost nothing is sacrosanct. He recalls in the book how once on air he prayed to God (a character he calls on regularly for comment and weather reports) to give one of his tormentors cancer. Surely, I suggest, this was beyond bad taste. He disagrees. It was just honest.
"All of us have said `I wish that person would drop dead'. So I was a little more creative about it. Some of the stuff I do is harsh." Where does be draw the line? "The premise of the show, at least my premise, is to split my head open and tell you everything that I'm thinking. Which I think is exciting. Just like I'd like to drill a hole in your head and see what you're really thinking. If I'm going to do that I'm never going to put a governor on myself and get on the air and start to pick and choose what I'm going to say. If there is a choosing process, it's to make people laugh. That's the goal. So if I found something truly unfunny such as the rape of a child then why would I put that on the air?"
Would he take a call from a paedophile? "Oh I would take that call. And actually begin to interview him and try to understand what is going on in his sick mind. The fact is, these guys don't see that they're destroying children. In fact, I have interviewed paedophiles on the air and I am very harsh with them."
In the US, Stern has the reputation of being a racist and a sexist, yet his central newscaster, Robin Quiver - a woman and black - has been a key player in his team since the earliest days. Not the butt of his humour, as some would have it, but his foil, his voice of reason. In the film - she plays herself - Quiver emerges as an uncompromising professional; not a woman likely to accept anything less than equality.
"I think a lot of these tags get put on me because they really don't listen to the show. It's just somebody telling somebody `Oh my God, Howard Stern called Jesse Jackson a jerk. He hates black people.' And I go `What, are you insane?'
"That doesn't mean I hate black people. I just hate Jesse Jackson. In America especially, if you discuss race, or even if you discuss how you feel about a black person, it had better be positive or you're a racist and that's how the label gets pinned on you. It's the same thing with homophobia. I've said on the radio I'm for gays in the military and gays should be allowed to have the same privileges that we all have. But am I fascinated by two men playing with each others' buttocks? Yes I am. I'm curious. And if I have a gay man on I'm going to ask him about that. But that doesn't mean I'm homophobic, that I hate him."
MANY people have tried to ape the Stern formula: shock jocks, as they've been called - generally right wing, racist - but they don't endure. Because although they might appear to be inhabiting the same shell, the nut is something very different. Last week Howard Stern was a guest on Channel 4's TFI Friday Stern was flagrantly flagged as America's answer to Chris Evans, the show's begetter and star. It made interesting viewing, particularly to those who find little to enjoy in Mr Evans's brand of public humiliation masquerading as humour. Using self-mockery laced with lacerating wit, Stern cut his host down to size while never alienating the partisan audience. Whereas Howard Stern can play the role of the racist bigot and sexist pig brilliantly, he always remains outside, a natural satirist who uses gross imagery and hyperbole for Swiftean ends.
"My biggest complaint about people who imitate me - and Chris Evans has heard my radio show and is more or less trying to be me - is that they do miss the humanity of it. Or they take some aspect of what I do - the outrageous bits, because that's the easiest thing to imitate - and that's the stuff Chris Evans picks up on and just goes and goes and goes with that. But it's not about that really. It's sort of about poking fun at me. I would like to think that at least my audience gets the smile behind it."
It would be wrong to give the impression that Howard Stern is NY or LA chic. He is not. He's a proletarian hero. His listeners are "the working stiffs, the Joes, the plumbers". And he speaks for them. However shocking Stern appears on the outside, at the core he is supremely moral. And he tunes like a human Exocet into the hypocrisy of whoever he's talking to.
All the elements that make Stern compulsive listening are there in the movie: fast, outrageous, soft-centred and very, very funny, not hindered by his appearance, which he accurately describes as "a cross between Louis XIV and Big Bird".
"I always believed the interesting thing about the movie would be not what you do on the air, but what is it like off the air. What happens in your life when you go home to your wife after making fun of a miscarriage on the air. I didn't want to whitewash. I didn't want to sanitise. That's why I think the film ultimately works because most people would not have put that in.
Hollywood loves success and Hollywood now loves Howard Stern. And he is open to offers. "I'm not going to rest on my laurels. That's not healthy. Take a guy like Quentin Tarantino who made Pulp Fiction. A wonderful film. Yet this guy hasn't made a film in all these years. Because I think he's satisfied. Like, `Look at me. I'm Quentin Tarantino I made Pulp Fiction'. And he goes to parties and he has a great life. Even though I've made a film, I want to be the person outside of Hollywood. I still don't want to hang out with celebrities because I want to be the person who pokes fun at them. I want to be the person that isn't accepted, that is the outlaw. I like that role and I want to stay in that."