After Danny Baker's cancer news I've realised he's a national treasure

My friend and "work"-mate of a quarter of a century, Danny Baker, announced last week that he has cancer. Even though I knew he was ill, the official recognition that one of life's natural powerhouses has been laid low (albeit with a prognosis, that, after lengthy therapy, is very positive) still left me feeling upset and weird. But not nearly as weird as what has followed.

From websites and Facebook forums, on Twitter feeds and blogs of every stripe, has poured an unstoppable torrent of concern, distress and – let's be blunt here – love.

For a fellow who, since his front-page days as a drinking buddy of Chris Evans and Paul Gascoigne, has largely kept himself to himself, it marks an astonishing outpouring of affection, all of it heartfelt and completely beyond the control of the normal showbiz publicity-generation apparatus. Danny does, incidentally, have a publicity machine; it's called his mouth.

Visiting him last Thursday, I found him in tremendous spirits. Surrounded by a shambles of books, iPods and newspapers, he was exactly like his normal self – except that a tube linked his right arm to a bag of very powerful chemicals. And he was wearing his pyjamas. The nurses and doctors remark on his stoicism and on the stellar quality of some of his visitors; not "showbiz chums" but real friends. Chris Evans has been. And Peter Kay. The phone rings; it's Elton John.

Normally when confronted with any kind of praise, Danny shrugs it off as "self-regarding nonsense", but he has been deeply and palpably touched by the effusion of regard and well-wishing to which he has been subjected. He has, I think, decided to save his famous combativeness for the bigger battles that lie ahead and, just this once, to let people say what they like about him. Normally the ringmaster and traffic-cop of public opinion, he is content just now to stand in its positive, if decidedly unexpected, glow.

This whole phenomenon is best illustrated from my own life. I normally ramble around the London borough of Islington unhindered, it's fair to say, by autograph hunters and glamour-seekers. On the contrary, it sometimes seems that people cross the road to avoid me.

Yet on the day after Danny's announcement, my weekly scoot around Sainsbury's, which usually accounts for no more than 20 precious minutes, took me nearly two hours. From the pork pie counter to the imported beer aisle, I was harried at every turn by people who presumably knew of my working and personal relationship with the man Baker.

They very gently and politely stopped me and said – every time looking me straight in the eyes – "Tell your mate we're thinking about him."… "Let him know how much we care."… "He's just the greatest…"

What's going on here is, after the initial shock wears off, obvious. We are, post-Diana, a nation of public weepers and wailers, of loudly declaimed involvement in the lives of people we have never met and hardly know. The events of the past few days are nothing like that; instead, they are the genuine howl of collective anguish we emit when we realise that something marvellous, but largely taken for granted, is suddenly under threat.

It is the realisation that Danny Baker, bless him, is something of a genius.

Why this fact should have been lost in the rush to make stars of tepid, cliche-bound writers and mealy-mouthed broadcasters is a mystery; the bloke has always been brilliant. Among a generation of NME scribes that included Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons and Nick Kent, Danny was always the sharpest and funniest. Rounding up the musical year zero that was 1977, he was his usual defiant mix of fun and fearlessness: "This has been the year of punk and therefore there is no excuse for not owning at least one record by… Chic." Point made; laugh got.

As anyone who has read the recent Classic Football Debates Sorted Out Once And For All; Volume 1 (Baker & Kelly – many copies still available!) will attest, he is still a terrific writer.

But it's on radio that his talent has really taken wing. Over the past 20 years I have had the slightly mad privilege of working with him (on radio stations far too numerous to list; I honestly believe we are the most sacked, rehired and sacked presenters of all time) as he has shaken up, then utterly changed, then continued to grace, the face of British broadcasting.

Ignore for a minute that he happens to be the best popular culture DJ out there and focus on his effect on the national game. Before Danny invented 6-0-6, football was still being presented by people in bow ties who'd been to school with the buffoons who run the FA. Out of nowhere, the boy from Deptford brought the wit and cussedness and vivacity of the people who actually watch (and therefore pay for) football to the airwaves.

Better, he brought their voices, opinions, idiosyncrasies and experiences. In its own way it was as revolutionary as when, in the mid-1950s, the great radio producer Charles Parker first forced working-class accents on to the BBC.

Now, of course, there is no other way to do football on the radio. And there are armies of presenters – copycats, pretenders, homagers; they know who they are – who should hang a picture of Danny on their living room wall and, each day before they go to work, get down on their knees in front of it and give humble thanks.

That he has not always been given credit for the quality of his work is down to a simple misapprehension. Because he glories in that south London accent, and because he loves football and pop music and – sin of sins – a laugh, he's been dismissed as a "lad" and a "geezer".

The people who said and believed those things just weren't listening. Open your ears; his vocabulary, and the use he makes of it, is second to none; nowhere in British radio is the language whipped along with such facility, such invention, such joy. Without even knowing it, listeners are having liquid gold poured into their ears.

I ought to say, before this becomes too much of a love-in, that he can be a proper nightmare to work with, dishevelled and truculent. He is (or, to be fair, we are) terrible at travelling. At the 2000 European Championships in Belgium and the Netherlands, he and I blithely got on a bus in the belief (based on absolutely nothing) that it would take us to Brussels.

Two hours later, we found ourselves in another city. In another country. We were eventually driven back to our distant hotel by Millwall hooligans in the back of a scientifically prepared battle van; they ditched us when they saw trouble in the streets and decided to join in. "It's kicking off lads; you're on your own."

Employers have often found him difficult too. He knows how to broadcast and will brook no argument. Neither will he, for that matter, accept any advice. Hence the regular arrival of the P45. His agent, Alex Armitage, puts it most elegantly: "He is a cat; you can give him a home, but you can never own him." It is that, of course, which makes him so valuable and sees his sideboard groaning with awards.

As he said in his statement, Danny is going to be in and out of hospital over the next few months, having chemotherapy then radiotherapy. He faces a hard road, but one which, the brilliant doctors of the NHS have assured him, will end in a successful cure.

It took a horrible illness to awaken us to a simple truth. We live in a society awash with celebrities, but have very few authentic National Treasures. Danny Baker is very much one of the latter. Good luck mate.