Bill Oddie, who has died aged 85, had two separate, substantial TV presences – as a comedy actor and an ornithologist. Both roles brought him fame but also pain. The peak of the former career was 76 episodes from 1970-82 of The Goodies, which he co-wrote and co-starred in with Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor. They played an eccentric trio of investigators and fixers who rode into action on a three-seater bicycle called a “trandem”.
Birdwatching and Springwatch
As a birdwatcher, his onscreen zenith was Springwatch, which he initially co-hosted with Kate Humble, from 2005. It began a BBC Two natural history franchise marking the change of seasons, its success leading to wintry, autumnal and summery spin-offs. Binoculars lowered to show eyes awed or enthused, and Oddie became TV’s signature birdwatcher.
Born in Rochdale, he came early to both comedy and ornithology. He was a teenager when his sightings first appeared in the annual report of the West Midland Bird Club. In his early 20s, he appeared in the West End and on Broadway in transfers of the Cambridge University revue in which he first worked professionally with Brooke-Taylor and Garden, who is now the only survivor of the three. Oddie wrote the music for the revue and then The Goodies, who released five spin-off singles in 1974-75, spending a combined 38 weeks in the pop charts, with Funky Gibbon, an anthropomorphic jungle dance number, reaching four in the Top 10.
Struggles and Mental Health
Each of Oddie’s TV hits, though, was overshadowed by sadness. In the case of Springwatch, it was personal. Particularly bad incidents of the bipolar condition he experienced throughout his life led him to miss a number of episodes. He returned to the programme, but his departure in 2008 – which he made clear was not voluntary – was triggered, by his account, by another serious depressive downturn.
In the case of The Goodies, there was an underlying resentment shared by Brooke-Taylor and Garden relating to the show’s treatment by the BBC. The series attracted 12 million viewers at its mid-70s peak – very high for a BBC Two show – and won the Silver Rose of Montreux, the second prize at Europe’s leading TV festival. The gong was for Kitten Kong, an inspired movie spoof in which a massive moggy terrorises London using some special effects impressive for the period.
Undervalued by the BBC
However, The Goodies was never valued by many corporation executives who – due to the relatively high quotient of slapstick, puns and visual gags involving animals – designated it a “children’s show”, which was intended as an insult and taken as such by two of the creators. For what proved to be the final series, the trio moved to London Weekend Television.
Unlike most hit shows of its period, The Goodies has not been regularly repeated on terrestrial TV, any re-airings by the BBC largely in archive slots. This upset and frustrated Oddie, Brooke-Taylor and Garden. During the home video and DVD boom, when it sometimes seemed that the BBC was systematically releasing all material ever shown, the threesome negotiated a box set release with a commercial outfit, which did something to redress the neglect.
A few other shows from the era have also been denied repeats and releases because they contain language or attitudes now considered unacceptable. BBC off-the-record briefers have sometimes suggested that this was why The Goodies has been so difficult to watch or buy. There is an occasion on which the three men start to apply blackface, but it occurred in an extraordinary 1975 episode called South Africa. This begins with the Goodies undertaking an advertising campaign to attract Britons to South Africa and ends in a Britain with a Black Enoch Powell presiding over a regime of reverse apartheid.
Although there is some silly wordplay – at one point, a regime of “apart-height” requires the diminutive Oddie to become a slave to his taller colleagues – the broadly progressive politics and complexity of the storyline make the “children’s television” tag seem particularly absurd. Indeed, absurdity is a more fitting label for South Africa and many other editions.
In The Goodies, the writer-actors played exaggerations of aspects of their character: Garden (a qualified doctor) professorial and absent-minded, Brooke-Taylor posh and patriotic, and Oddie sulky and scrappy. Those characteristics meant that some colleagues found him hard to work with – which may have contributed to his departure from Springwatch – but some such behaviour was explained, if not entirely excused, by his mental health issues.
Oddie was quite right, though, to be annoyed by the diminishment in BBC and TV history of The Goodies, memories of which will make its viewers smile amid the sadness at his death. His admirers will also hope that any afterlife contains a chorus of birdsong.
