Bill Oddie, the last twitcher of the apocalypse, has finally gained his own wings at the age of 85, leaving behind a trail of rubber chickens, protest placards, and an alarming number of binoculars pointed at the wrong end of the garden. He went, one suspects, with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had spent half a century trying to convince the British public that staring at a small brown bird in a hedge constituted a meaningful life.
Born in Rochdale in 1941 and raised in Birmingham by a father who balanced the books at the Midlands Electricity Board while young Bill balanced his obsessions with jazz, satire, and oology, Oddie arrived at Cambridge like a northern missile aimed at the Footlights. He emerged as one third of The Goodies, that peculiar 1970s institution which proved that slapstick, eco-sermons, and songs about funky gibbons could coexist in the same half-hour slot without the BBC’s head of comedy reaching for the smelling salts. Where Graeme Garden supplied the mad science and Tim Brooke-Taylor the bewildered decency, Oddie brought the anarchic growl and the hairy cynicism. He wrote the hits, thumped the drums, and generally behaved as if the entire medium of television had been invented solely to annoy him.
The Goodies made him famous; fame, in turn, allowed him to spend the second half of his life telling people off for disturbing the nesting habits of the lesser-spotted whatever. It was a smooth transition. One minute he was falling off buildings in a giant custard tart; the next he was falling into raptures over a warbler in a bush. The public barely noticed the difference. As a conservationist he was tireless, which is to say he never tired of pointing out that the rest of us were busy murdering the planet while pretending to like David Attenborough. He presented Springwatch and Autumnwatch with the air of a man who had accepted that his audience consisted largely of retired majors who wanted to see badgers but would settle for a lecture on biodiversity.
Oddie collected honours the way other men collect parking tickets: an OBE for services to wildlife and mild irritation, honorary fellowships, and the quiet respect of people who secretly preferred their comedians bearded and bolshie. He suffered the usual late-life indignities—depression, the sense that the world was getting louder and stupider—but met them with the same sardonic shrug he once gave a collapsing set on live television.
In the end, Bill Oddie did what few comedians manage: he turned a childhood hobby into a second act that outlasted the first. He leaves a wife, children, several thousand grateful birds, and one lingering question: if the planet really is doomed, who will be left to watch the spring? Probably not us. But somewhere, a lesser redpoll is raising a silent wing in tribute.