Howard Stern's journey from shock jock to Kamala Harris' “bright” lapdog

At no point was Springsteen tied to his collar. Instead, the tone was lively and conversational, as Stern, with his signature deep, rumbling voice, seemed like a kindly confessor to whom Springsteen could speak his mind without fear of judgment. If there's one point in the universe that's furthest from Jeremy Paxman when Newsnight reaches its climax, it's this one.

Stern, 70, has been a well-known figure in American broadcasting since the 1980s, and it is inevitable that he has changed both as a person and as a media personality during that time. Nonetheless, few changes have been so radical — and it's remarkable that a figure as divisive as Stern has reinvented himself as the whisperer of arch-celebrity and, according to his old friend Donald Trump, the king of the “woke.”

That he bothered to be offensive was part of Stern's appeal. In 1997, he made a film called Private Parts celebrating his gratuitousness. In the film, in which he played himself in his early years as a DJ, Stern joked on television about the death of Grace Kelly and encouraged a listener to “have sex” with her radio speaker while breaking the microphone. Even in the late '90s, “Private Parts” seemed like a film from a bygone era – an outrageous sex comedy from the '70s that Stern passed off as a quasi-authentic biography.