Bill Oddie returned to Rochdale, the town of his birth, for the first episode of the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? more than 50 years after moving away. The Goodies and Springwatch star, who died on Saturday aged 85, was born at Birch Hill Hospital in Littleborough in 1941 and left at the age of seven when his accountant father Harry got a job in Birmingham.
In a 1965 interview with the Rochdale Observer, Oddie said he remembered the town of his birth by name and little else. "We lived somewhere on the outskirts," he told a reporter down the phone from London, where he was about to star in the BBC radio show I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, adding: "I think it was called Castleton."
A family history of mill workers
Research for the show revealed that his ancestors on both sides were all mill workers. His grandmother Emily Worrall, who largely raised him, was born in Rochdale and most likely worked in Arrow Mill in Castleton from the age of 13. Oddie also recalled his distant relationship with his father, which he put down to his domineering grandmother, while crediting her with fostering his love of birds.
The programme also uncovered details about his mother Lilian, who had been committed to a psychiatric institution when Oddie was a young boy. He grew up believing she suffered from schizophrenia and abandoned him, and only saw her a few times before her death in 1990.
The truth about his mother
During filming, two nurses who cared for his mother told him she was a "manic depressive". He also learned that his mother had miscarried one baby and, a year before he was born, had a daughter named Margaret who died at five days old. The baby's death came after Oddie's grandmother stopped his mother checking on the crying infant in her cot; by the time she went to her, the child had choked to death.
Oddie, who experienced bouts of clinical depression in later life that he believed were caused by the turmoil of his childhood, said learning about the trauma in his mother's life allowed him to reassess his opinion of her.
"This journey has been a real lifesaver because one thing this has completely confirmed is that my mother was in no way negligent or incompetent, she was immensely unlucky in things that happened to her," he said. "But I can really say, you know, I'm really sorry mum. I'm really sorry what happened. I wish I'd known her better and I wish she'd known me. I wish she'd had a better life and I wish I could have done anything about it."
