Bob Holness - Telegraph The arrival of the dance drug Ecstasy on the rave scene also led to Holness being regularly asked for an "E" by his tittering student contestants. One unexpected monument to his popularity was the widespread urban myth that Holness played the haunting saxophone solo riff on the Gerry Rafferty hit Baker Street (1978). In fact it was played by the Scottish musician Raphael Ravenscroft . The story about Holness is believed to have been started as a spoof in the music paper New Musical Express in 1990. Robert Wentworth John Holness was born on November 12 1928 at Vryheid, northern Natal, and spent his early years in South Africa, where his father worked for a mining company. When he was seven the family moved to England, settling at Ashford in Kent. During the war, he recalled, he "cycled all over Kent, souvenir hunting for shrapnel from wrecked planes." It was also in childhood that he developed his lifelong love of radio: "I used to listen all night under the covers to the American Forces Network." After Ashford Grammar School and Maidstone College of Art, Holness trained as a printer, but he hankered for a career on the stage. When he returned with his family to South Africa, he took a printing job but gave it up after only two months to join a British repertory company opening up in Durban. Eighteen months later he broke into broadcasting as a radio actor, making his debut on the South African Broadcasting Corporation in 1955. In one play he played an early version of James Bond. He had his own radio show on which he interviewed visiting stars, among them Cliff Richard and Petula Clark. However, Holness wanted his two small daughters to have an English education, and he also wished to break into the new medium of television. It took him and his wife Mary, an actress, years to save up the fare back to England. After arriving in Britain in 1961, Holness became a familiar face on television. On ITV he hosted Take A Letter, which ran for two and a half years; one puzzle set for the viewers attracted nearly one million entries. He went on to host Junior Criss Cross Quiz, an embryonic form of Blockbusters. He co-presented the Today television programme with Eamonn Andrews before returning to radio, with appearances hosting Workers" Playtime, Housewives" Choice, 12 O'Clock Spin, Top of the Form (another quiz show that stretched the minds of the youthful contestants) and Late Night Extra on Radio 2, with which he stayed for eight years. With the introduction of commercial radio in the early 1970s, Holness joined LBC in London, paired with Douglas Cameron for the early morning AM programme, in which they exchanged banter between news items. The idea was taken up by John Timpson and Robert Robinson on the Radio 4 Today programme. Holness was with LBC for 10 years, during which he reckoned to have conducted more than 10,000 live interviews. On AM, he also introduced the first regular helicopter traffic service. In the early 1980s he returned to television, his roles as chairman of Call My Bluff and host of Blockbusters making him a household name. At the same time he continued to work in radio, appearing on Anything Goes, a twice-weekly anthology of words and music for the BBC World Service. He enjoyed the intimacy of this show, with requests "ranging from a recording of a cuckoo for a Surrey gentleman in Swaziland to Fats Domino for a lady in Australia." In 1991 he hosted a new Radio 2 series on Saturday evenings, Bob Holness Requests The Pleasure, with its unmistakable echoes of the old In Town Tonight. Bob Holness, who had suffered a series of strokes over the past two decades, is survived by his wife and their son and two daughters. Bob Holness, born November 12 1928, died January 6 2012