If you have ever switched on CNN International in an hotel room you will almost certainly have seen Richard Quest, the shouty, flamboyant British presenter who has become, somewhat improbably, one of the US network's best-known faces. It may be hard to look at him in quite the same way again after his nocturnal arrest in Central Park.

A New York judge ordered Quest to undergo six months of counselling after he was picked up in the park at 3.40am and found to be carrying a packet of what appeared to be methamphetamine. His lawyer said Quest did not realise that the park had a curfew and he was returning to his hotel with friends.

In the US, Quest, 46, made a name for himself with his “quirky” style. Some love him for his distinctiveness in the rather staid world of network news. Others find his over-the-top delivery affected and irritating. It remains to be seen if this incident will leave him in any way muted.

Quest grew up in Liverpool and then studied law at Leeds University. He cut his teeth at the radio station at the city's St James's Hospital and then landed a place on the BBC's coveted trainee scheme, despite the disadvantage, as he saw it, of having gone to comprehensive school. His break came on Radio 4's Financial World Tonight. He has said that he didn't know much about business but if he didn't know how a company was performing he would bluff it by asking: “So chairman, how will you explain these results to your shareholders?”

When an economics correspondent was “tired and emotional” during the 1987 Wall Street Crash, he stepped in and did well enough to create a job for himself as the Wall Street correspondent. He claims to have been the BBC's youngest foreign correspondent at 27.

He moved to CNN after 15 years and now travels widely and has his own feature programme, Quest. “People say business is boring,” he told an interviewer, “but after water, food and sex, how you spend your money is the most important thing”.

He has admitted that “sometimes I go over the top and the bosses have to rein me back. I wore some Royal Opera House costumes for a piece, but my boss hated it”. If he wasn't on TV, he has said, he would be “a flight attendant. To work with magical flying machines every day and see the world”.

His journalistic ambition is to be a CNN White House correspondent but he has said that he thinks his British accent counts against him. He turned down an approach from al-Jazeera's English-language channel because he felt that being Jewish and gay made him unsuitable.

Despite the outward bravado, he has spoken of insecurity about his career. “How the hell did I get the job, given that my BBC contemporaries were Fergal Keane and John Simpson?” he once asked. “I still think that one day I'll be found out.”