David Lewis Jacobs, CBE (19 May 1926 – 2 September 2013) was a British broadcaster perhaps best known as presenter of the BBC Television 1960s peak-time show Juke Box Jury, and as chairman of the long-running BBC Radio 4 topical forum Any Questions? Earlier radio work included small acting parts: over the years he played himself or presenter characters in film, television and radio productions. Jacobs finally stepped down as a BBC Radio 2 presenter shortly before his death in August 2013, his career having spanned more than 65 years. Early life and career Jacobs was born to a Jewish family, the youngest of three sons of Jeanette and David Jacobs senior, in Streatham Hill, London, and educated at Belmont College and Strand School. In his early years the family was affluent, but his father, a Covent Garden fruit importer, was bankrupted in 1939 after suffering ill-health for a decade, and the family soon lost their home. This forced his youngest son to leave school at 14, and Jacobs took up various short-term jobs, before he served in the Royal Navy from 1944 to 1947, and performed on the popular BBC General Forces Programme Navy Mixture in 1944. He became an announcer with the British Forces Broadcasting Service and was chief announcer on Radio SEAC in Ceylon (1945–47). Jacobs was later assistant station director. A BBC staff announcer in the early 1950s, his voice intoned the title for many of the 53 episodes of the space adventure series Journey Into Space. He played 22 parts in the series. He also broadcast on Radio Luxembourg. He had, between 1957 to 1961, established the chart show format of the BBC Light Programme's Pick of the Pops, to which he briefly returned in 1962. Between 1957 to 1966, he presented A Song for Europe and provided the UK commentary at Eurovision Song Contests. Jacobs presented Juke Box Jury on BBC television between 1959 and 1967. This was a weekly show in which a guest panel reviewed newly released pop records and forecast whether each would become a "hit" or a "miss". By 1962 the programme attracted 12 million viewers weekly on Saturday nights. He was one of the four original presenters of Top of the Pops when it began in 1964, but remained a presenter of the programme for only its first two years. "I became too square for the pop scene", he