This first volume of veteran television and radio broadcaster Danny Baker's memoirs takes us from his early years through to his fledging television career at the beginning of the 80s and does not cover his more recent fight against mouth and throat cancer.

Indeed, born in 1957, Baker apologises for the lack of misery ("The whiff of the workhouse") in this memoir. He acknowledges that it's "poor autobiographical form" to have enjoyed such a joyous childhood, growing up in a Bermondsey council flat (near where Kray rivals the Richardsons ran a torture chamber under the railway arches). Baker muses: "And what was our life like in the noisy, dangerous and polluted industrial pock mark wedged into one of the capital's toughest neighbourhoods? Utterly magnificent, and I'd give anything to climb inside it again just for one day."

This joie de vivre, this Teflon spirit, is the engine that drives this memoir. Chapters on childhood can sometimes be hard work in an autobiography: the most patient reader could end up thinking: "Shut up and get to the famous people." Here, they are a riotous read. A bright, popular child (top of his year, he turns down a place at the local grammar), Baker recounts his early love for football (Millwall FC), setting fire to abandoned cars, and a failed baked potato heist at the local greengrocers, which he credits with turning him away from a life of crime.

Meanwhile, Baker's colourful father embarks on a one-man crusade to beat the system, wheeling and dealing in a way that Baker points out was normal for the area and era: "When Only Fools and Horses arrived on TV, most people I knew thought it was a documentary." Already a music fan, 12-year-old Baker is taken to see the musical Hair by his sister and her boyfriend, only to be mortified when a frugging naked cast member's penis brushes his ear. "If this was the counterculture, give me Matt Munro. Give me Dorothy Squires. But right now, somebody give me a flannel."

Leaving school, Baker finds work in a hyper-trendy record shop frequented by the likes of Elton John, Queen, Mick Jagger and Marc Bolan, the latter literally giving him the shirt (blouse) off his back. Finding himself rechristened Denise by his new gay mates, Baker boosts his success with girls by spreading a rumour that he is David Essex's brother.

Indeed, throughout this tome, Baker doesn't so much drop famous names as fire them at you with a cannon for seemingly no other reason than to amuse and entertain with topnotch anecdotes.

This continues as he gets involved with punk via his friend Mark Perry and the influential fanzine Sniffin' Glue. Baker joins the NME, first as a receptionist (incompetent), then a writer (excellent), encountering various luminaries, including the Clash, Blondie, Kate Bush, the Fall and, most uproariously, an amazingly strange Michael Jackson in the days before everyone realised he was amazingly strange. Baker even achieves the holy grail of music journalism by attending the legendary Sex Pistols gig at the 100 Club, only to pop out in the middle for a natter with a mate. (In rock lore terms, this is akin to Moses sloping off for a chinwag just as God arrives with the Ten Commandants.) Later, Baker describes meeting Pistols guitarist Steve Jones at the toilets. DB: "How's it going?" SJ: "Not bad. Better now I've had this slash." Observes Baker: "It was the sort of exchange that gave the Algonquin Round Table a run for its money."

During this period, Baker made his first TV appearances as a kind of "yoof-for-hire" ("Holding society responsible for stuff"), which led to further broadcasting work (Twentieth Century Box; The 6 O'clock Show). The book ends with Baker astonished to be asked for an autograph at the brink of a career, where, as he puts it, he would become "so ubiquitous on British screens, everyone would, quite rightly, become sick of the fucking sight of me".

Admittedly, when Baker attempts "personal stuff" (such as getting together with wife Wendy) things get a little stilted. (His take is that people who reveal too much "need locking up".) But it's a minor quibble. This book is a hoot, buzzing with Baker's impressive recall and nuclear-strength warmth and humour. Going to Sea in a Sieve emerges not only as a portrait of Baker the individual, but also as a hymn to bygone times that is as affectionate as it is brutally unsentimental and hilarious. The perfect read for anyone interested in music, football, media, British cultural history, or indeed just having a really good laugh.