Bill Oddie obituary
Comedy star of the 1970s as one of the Goodies whose love of birds led to a second career as a wildlife presenter
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.
He teamed up with Kate Humble and Simon King to present the live outside broadcasts Wild in Your Garden (2003) and Britain Goes Wild With Bill Oddie (2004), which evolved into the popular, long-running Springwatch and Autumnwatch that are still going strong – though Oddie was dropped in 2008 and replaced by Chris Packham.
He always had a reputation for being a bit grouchy and famously refused to be featured on This Is Your Life. When, in 2001, Michael Aspel approached him with his big red book and the words, “Bill Oddie, this is your life,” he responded: “It’s not. I always said I wouldn’t do it and I won’t.” His family eventually persuaded him to go ahead with the show and it was screened early the following year. “I’m known as a bit of a bad-tempered bugger,” he admitted.
Bill was born in Littleborough, outside the Lancashire mill town of Rochdale, to Lilian (nee Clegg) and Harry Oddie. He was brought up from the age of six in the Birmingham suburb of Quinton by his father, who broke out of his family’s history in the mills by becoming an accountant, and his paternal grandmother, Emily.
His mother had been committed to a psychiatric institution. Oddie grew up believing she had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and abandoned him, and he saw her only a few times before her death in 1990, while recalling a distant relationship with his father that he put down to his domineering grandmother, whom he could credit only with fostering in him a love of birds.
Later in life, Oddie experienced bouts of clinical depression and believed they had been caused by the emotional turmoil of his childhood. When he traced his family history for the BBC genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are? in 2014, he admitted: “If anybody had asked me, ‘What do you think of your mother?’ I would just say, ‘I hate her.’”
Doing research for the show, he was told by an aunt that his mother miscarried one baby, then – before his birth – had a daughter who died at five days old, when his grandmother stopped her checking the girl in her cot. Two of those who cared for his mother at the institution said she actually suffered from manic depression, not schizophrenia. Visibly moved, Oddie expressed regret that he had seen his mother so little and said he realised that she was “in no way negligent” but “immensely unlucky”.
At the same time, he credited his father with ensuring he had a good education, at Halesowen grammar school, then King Edward’s school, Birmingham. As a child, he spent his spare time watching birds at a reservoir and his observations were included in the West Midland Bird Club’s annual reports.
While studying English literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he continued this pastime and had ambitions to become a warden of a bird reserve.
Oddie wrote for the final episode of the satirical TV series That Was the Week That Was in 1963 and appeared regularly in its second sequel, BBC-3 (1965-66). He both wrote and performed in The Frost Report (1966-67), At Last the 1948 Show (1967), Twice a Fortnight (1967), Broaden Your Mind and Marty (both 1968-69), and contributed scripts to Hark at Barker (1969), and Doctor in the House (1969-70) and its sequels.
In 1983, he married Laura Beaumont (his second wife), who wrote children’s books and television programmes. He also played drums in her band, Too Many Westerns, and together they wrote for ITV’s anthology series Dramarama, aimed at young viewers, and their own children’s sitcom, From the Top (1985-86), in which he starred as a bank manager-turned-actor. He and Garden wrote the sitcom Astronauts (1981-83), and he and his fellow Goodies voiced the superhero cartoon Bananaman (1983-86).
Oddie said that being dropped from the Springwatch and Autumnwatch series after the 2008 programmes had a “detrimental” effect on his mental wellbeing and he had made two suicide attempts. In January 2020, he said that he was overcoming depression and bipolar disorder by taking lithium, but eight months later said he had been “very ill” with lithium toxicity.
His many books included Bill Oddie’s Little Black Bird Book (1980), Birding with Bill Oddie (1997) and his autobiography, One Flew into the Cuckoo’s Egg (2008).
He was a member of the RSPB council, president of the League Against Cruel Sports and a vice-president of the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers. In 2003, he was appointed OBE for his wildlife conservation work.
Oddie is survived by Laura and their daughter, Rosie; by Kate (the actor Kate Hardie) and Bonnie, the daughters of his first marriage, in 1967, to the actor-singer Jeanne Hart, which ended in divorce; and by three grandchildren.
Anthony Hayward
Stephen Moss writes: In many ways, Bill Oddie was the exact opposite of David Attenborough, that other towering figure in TV about the natural world – he was more excited by blue tits than blue whales, quirky rather than serious, and above all utterly unpredictable. He was the jazz musician to Attenborough’s concert pianist: his free-form style giving his programmes an appropriately organic feel.
Like his friend Michael Palin, Bill was one of that select band of TV presenters who achieved fame in two totally different fields: in his case, comedy and natural history. His deep knowledge of birds came from a lifelong passion, and he was respected by his birding peers despite his fame, rather than because of it.
As a TV presenter, he broke every rule in the book: looking at the bird rather than towards the camera, wandering off in search of his quarry, and always ad-libbing his dialogue. On the live-format Springwatch, he was in his element – as the series producer, I simply had no idea what he would say or do next.
He was utterly committed to his work; and in my view, was one of a handful of true geniuses to have graced our television screens.
• Bill Oddie (William Edgar Oddie), actor, writer and ornithologist, born 7 July 1941; died 25 July 2026