Missing: Shock Jocks who talk sense in the UK

Louis Barfe trawls the radio waves, hoping to be shocked.

Howard Stern is in trouble. Again. One congressman wants to make on-air "indecency" a criminal offence. As the Federal Communications Commission regularly slaps six-figure fines on Stern, it's obvious who's being targeted. Stern's name is known over here, along with a vague idea that he does rude stuff on the wireless. Back when ADSL was a supermarket for dyslexics, this ignorance was forgivable, but not when a visit to the alt.binaries.howard-stern newsgroup allows us to download the latest show (illegally) within hours of its broadcast.

When the Pope died, Howard's main field of interest was whether his successor should be black. Cue vox pops on the subject, so unreasonable and incoherent that Stern assumed they had been gathered in the Twilight Zone.

Next, a supposed debate on the topic between two "retards" and a Ku Klux Klan official, in which the so-called retards were vastly more intelligent than the Klansman.

However, in among the titties-and-beer banter, of which there is, admittedly, quite a lot (Howard is obsessed with "hot chicks" and his self-professed lack of success with them) and the crude satire, there is an underlying intelligence and liberalism missing from most of US talk radio.

Stern felt uneasy at crowds bestowing "rock star adulation" on the Pope, especially since most of them were "not even sure what he was up to". In particular his callers were unaware of the Pope turning a blind eye to paedophile scandals involving priests that he knew and liked. A bitter pill expertly sugared for an audience who probably hadn't given the matter a single thought before.

There has never been a British Stern, and our regulations mean there probably never will be. (Why no pirate talk stations, I wonder? If I'm missing any, let me know at wireless@louisbarfe.com).

On the other hand, this might not be such a bad thing. For every Howard Stern, there are far too many bigoted crowd-pleasers, like Rush Limbaugh. British talk-radio hosts have to be far more even-handed: even the self-styled hard men like TalkSport's James Whale, BBC London's Jon Gaunt and LBC's Nick Ferrari are beacons of sense and reason compared to Limbaugh et al.

Not to say that the blandest talk jocks don't have their quirks. Take David Prever (LBC 97.3, 2pm weekdays) - a self-professed hetero who appears to be completely obsessed with gaydom. I've not subjected Prever's output to statistical analysis (stop sniggering at the back), but he spends at least one show a week discussing some aspect of geezer-on-chap action: "Are homosexual men more promiscuous than straight men like me?", and, "Should gay men be allowed to adopt?", followed by, "What does it feel like to accommodate a man in your mouth?" Someone take him to a Scissor Sisters gig, FFS.