After battling cancer, Danny Baker makes return to the airwaves

(DAVID SANDISON)

Less than half a year after being diagnosed with cancer, the TV and radio personality Danny Baker is set to "un-retire" with a return to the airwaves.

In a buoyant message to his fans, Baker said he had come to the realisation while watching "dubious DVDs" that "things could not go on like this forever", and asked himself: "What was I doing with my life?"

The Deptford-born broadcaster, whose career has spanned almost every available medium in entertainment and journalism, is to make a return to radio with a show on BBC London 94.9 from 18 April.

Declaring himself to be "croaky, thinner but none the wiser", Baker proffered that he "had something more to offer than another busted flush like the Cat & Dog Super Bowl and endless days watching What A Carve Up". He added: "I realise this will reduce Steve Wright's overall audience figures by more than 300 but it's a tough game we're in Steve."

Judging by the response to his announcement yesterday, it would be a welcome return for the 53-year-old who was, at various points in his career, accused by some of over-exposure.

But his absence from the public eye appears to have been the catalyst in propelling him from "washed up" (a term he recounted being described as in a review) to national treasure. Hundreds of well-wishers and fans replied to the announcement on Facebook with enthusiastic messages of support, and the BBC has said it hopes he will return to his old show on Radio 5 Live.

It would have been hard for any member of the British public not to have come across Danny Baker at some point during the past few decades. Beginning what was to be a meandering path through British pop-culture, he landed a job at the NME in the late Seventies.

He became a household name as a presenter on LWT's Six O'Clock Show in the Eighties. It was during his stint there that the infamous clip of him engaged in an altercation with a railwayman – who Baker asks: "Don't you know who I am?" – was filmed. He later cemented his place in the living-rooms of British families with presenting roles on television shows such as Win, Lose or Draw and Pets Win Prizes.

As is often the case with celebrity endorsements, many would have found it hard to forget Baker's role in advertising campaigns for Daz washing powder and Mars, but it is because of his force of personality, humour and versatility that meant he was rarely without work. From the late Eighties, Baker maintained a presence on radio, with periods at Radio 1, 5 Live, Radio 2, Virgin Radio and BBC London. In November last year, after a period of unexplained absence from his presenting duties at London 94.9, that Baker announced via a communiqué similar in tone to the one in which he announced his "un-retirement" that he had cancer and would be presenting his shows "sparingly."

He had been due to begin radiotherapy in January this year. Announcing his departure last year, he said: "Once the quacks have soundly thrashed this thing I shall return like a rare gas and as if out of a trap. In the meantime I am watching Tommy Steele box sets (and has there ever been a more lying title to a film than TS's It's All Happening?) and urge you all to keep yakking up a storm and laugh extra loud at the incumbents."