https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/jul/27/bill-oddie-obituary
"Bill Oddie, who has died aged 85, was a multi-talented performer who found his
greatest comedy success on television with his fellow Cambridge University
Footlights members Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden in
The Goodies, a
sketch show that combined the anarchic elements of
Monty Python’s Flying
Circus with “silly” sight gags.
Oddie’s self-taught musical skills steered the trio into the charts with his
compositions – pastiche rock’n’roll songs such as
The Funky Gibbon and
Nappy
Love. And when that was all over, he carved out a new career as the small
screen’s most famous birdwatcher, credited with encouraging new generations to
become enthusiasts for the natural world.
Oddie’s path to fame began when he wrote musical numbers for the Footlights
revue
A Clump of Plinths. He appeared in it at the 1963 Edinburgh festival
with other Cambridge students, including Brooke-Taylor and the future Pythons
John Cleese and Graham Chapman. Within weeks, the show transferred to the West
End of London, retitled
Cambridge Circus, and to Broadway the following year.
A 1963 BBC radio version was turned into a sketch series,
I’m Sorry I’ll Read
That Again, which ran for six years from 1964. After the first year, Oddie was
joined as the show’s regular scriptwriter by Garden, a later Footlights
recruit. When its successor,
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue – an improvised
parody of panel games – began in 1972, Oddie was a team member for two years.
Brooke-Taylor and Garden continued on that show after Oddie left, but kept
their partnership with him going on TV in
The Goodies, which started in 1970
and carried on for 10 years. In this, they all wrote and appeared in surreal
sketches blending slapstick and stop-motion film techniques as they travelled
around on a “trandem” (a three-seater bicycle) – frequently falling off – for
their agency promising to do “anything, anytime”. Oddie was projected as the
hairy, untidy one, Brooke-Taylor as pompous and Garden as professorial. When
the BBC struggled to find a budget for further episodes, ITV took it on with a
1981 Christmas special and a six-part series the following year.
After a foray into children’s TV, Oddie threw himself into communicating his
lifelong love of birds and other wildlife to viewers in series such as
Birding
with Bill Oddie (1997-2000), and
Bill Oddie Goes Wild (2001-03), as well as
one-off documentaries in far-flung countries."
RIP,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
