Is this a confession or a rationisation? Is he saying “Sorry”, “Sorry, but...” or “Look, you have to understand...”?

More than #MeToo has changed the showbiz landscape, and the culture generally, since Stern was in his K-ROCK height in the 1980s. To suggest, as I have just done, that it was downhill from there is a bold suggestion, but look at the evidence.

On conventional FM radio, he was the eternal goad, with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the proxy for every broadcasting and, by extension, cultural norm trying to rein him in. The excitement of listening to Stern was the thrill of gladiatorial combat: between the conventional and the daring; the uptight and the liberated.

Ring a bell?

Yes, the good ol' Swinging Sixties, with its Dad Rock survivor re-staging the cultural wars of his youth and, this time, winning.

He insisted on bringing Hollywood's casting couch right into mainstream radio — proving, not incidentally, that the pictures are better there. But he was outré in far more areas than the sexual, and that's where the book runs into the sand or, more appropriately, the mire.

You see, where you might have spotted abuse — where Howard might have perpetrated abuse — he now sees only his own OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder); where you heard rude and exploitative, Howard now replays the tape as commercial pressures and those damned ratings books.

The rationalisations and self-justifications go on and on. And OCD, by the way, is only one of many H.S. mental illnesses he uses to give himself a free pass for a variety of unpleasant incidents and attitudes; and for what, more generally, some on the feminist left have wittily and aptly labelled his "strip-club misogyny".

All those “out with the guys” episodes, a mainstay of K-ROCK, now seem shame-tinged less, perhaps, because of any deep misogyny and more because they seem tired, forced and out-of-date. What was daring now seems strained and pathetic. What was amusing now seems formulaic and repetitive. He may not have been a one-trick pony, but there may have been a recycling of two or perhaps three tricks: (1) Howard gets lucky — nearly — with a starlet; (2) Howard monsters and obsessively attacks a rival; (3) Howard strikes a non-PC pose on some topic of the day.

Some great radio is rescued from all of this. And the book, in fairness, shows what was rescued from K-ROCK, to be refined and, yes, at times improved on SIRIUS: his gift for serious (what used to be called “in-depth”) interviews; his introspection; his often-buried capacity for self-criticism. No, not those sensationalist K-ROCK confessions, but those more mature reflections we've heard in the last three or four years.

One of the problems of looking back at Stern is that it forces us to look back at ourselves. We tuned in by the million to that festival of naked massage girls, wind-breaking celebrations, and sophomoric humour. We were compliant and, towards the end, uneasily repentent. And yes, #MeToo hurried the process along.

For all those reasons, Howard Stern Comes Again is an uneasy read. He changed radio, and then left it to join what is (for reasons far more profound than the technology) a totally different medium.

What, on the radio landscape, did he leave behind? A few hundred Howard Sterns, for sure, all of them cack-handed, stumbling, uneasy and vaguely ashamed of their own faux outrageousness.

John Reith, early doyen of the emerging BBC, famously said of radio, "only the wind will listen", an observation that became the title of Andrew Boyle’s fine Reith biography.

In Stern's case, we did the listening and the wind did the broadcasting. But both Boyle and Stern reveal — the latter unwittingly — how ephemeral it all is, even at its best. There have always been exceptional moments, when great radio changed history; Stern got us to change the dial, but that's all.

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