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South End Green resident Bill Oddie shows his community man side by switching on the Christmas lights |
The Goodie, the bad, the ugly
Bill Oddie’s intriguing autobiography asks some uncomfortable questions of himself, writes Matthew Lewin
One Flew Into the Cuckoo’s Egg.
By Bill Oddie.
Hodder & Stoughton, £20. Order this book
IT’S not easy being a celebrity, and nobody knows that better than Bill Oddie, who has had a impressive career as a comedian, comedy writer, actor, singer – even a dancer – and now an immensely successful bird and wildlife broadcaster.
The 67-year-old has spoken publicly about his bouts of clinical depression and was also the subject of one of the most remarkable episodes of BBC2’s Who Do You Think You Are?, which revealed that his schizophrenic mother had been locked away in a mental hospital for many years.
The full story has now unfolded in his highly original autobiography, One Flew Into the Cuckoo’s Egg, which is at once a deeply intriguing, captivating and hilarious account of his life and career.
He is also a man with a reputation for being somewhat grumpy, for not suffering fools gladly and for giving interviewers who ask silly questions a hard time. He admits in the book that in the past he sometimes didn’t do a good job of being likeable.
So my first question to him when I met him at his home in South End Green was: “Are you in a good mood?” I was relieved to be answered by his trademark wheezy giggle.
This is a much more mellow Bill Oddie than the sometimes irascible character of the 1980s and 1990s.
“I think I do better nowadays at being likeable,” he told me.
“I think I’m a more reasonable judge of my personality now and I think I’m more sensitive and tolerant. But I obviously wasn’t before, and I was quite shocked when I was told how abrasive I could be, and even hurtful.
“The big thing that has changed with me in the last few years is that I have realised my need to have people around me and to work with a team. I am much more tolerant now. It’s a conscious thing, partly based on my own circumstances which have reminded me how much I really need the support of an extended family of people I live and work with.”
That extends to his immediate surroundings in South End Green, where he takes enormous delight in the village atmosphere.
Some of the first half of the book deals with the extraordinary fact that Oddie’s mother disappeared from his life when he was about two or three years old, and he only saw her on very few occasions in his life after that.
He writes in the book: “Here is a fact. I cannot remember any time whatsoever in my childhood – or beyond – when Mum was actually living with us. As a mother, as a wife. Mum and Dad as parents. I don’t remember her playing with me, or taking me to school, or giving me a bath, or reading to me, or us going on holiday. I don’t remember her cuddling me, and I don’t remember wanting a cuddle. I don’t remember wanting anything from her. Except for her to stay away. Because I was scared of her.”
The book deals with the subject with no holds barred. “That’s because there weren’t any holds to be barred,” he told me. “I have literally no childhood memories whatsoever of my mum, except for little tasters which are like seeing short extracts from a film and never seeing the whole movie.
“This has been a kind of detective journey that only started in the last five or six years. It was something I had to look at and find out about because I’d had my first bout of clinical depression when I was 60.
“As soon as you have any therapy you start being asked questions such as: ‘Tell me about your mother’, and I realised that there was a lot of ground to cover! I also remember the therapist saying to me: ‘There’s nearly always dead babies involved somewhere,’ and he was totally and utterly right because in fact we discovered there had been two dead babies.
“My mother had one stillborn child, as well as another which was a cot death at five days old. This was 1940, and the poor woman didn’t stand a chance – it was in the middle of a war, and at a time when nobody understood a thing about post-natal depression.”
Oddie is equally candid about his own depression, although he is wary of becoming a “celebrity depressive” with glib answers for everyone.
“One thing I will say is that there is no question whatsoever that there is not enough therapy available on the NHS, not by a long way,” he says. “It’s OK for someone like me who is working and has some means to see a therapist, sometimes every day when I have needed it. But that costs a lot of money and most people just cannot afford it.
“There is too much talk about cognitive behaviour therapy as the bleeding answer to everything. I’ll go on the record and say that it isn’t necessarily.
“There are no cure-alls, and the only thing that I would encourage fellow sufferers to believe is that you can and will recover.”
In the second half of the book he adopts a completely original device of interviewing himself.
“I did this because it allows me to represent both sides of myself and play devil’s advocate – to attack myself and then defend myself,” he told me. “So I can question everything from the point of view of someone who is not impressed with it all, and also ask questions that, if they were asked by a real interviewer, I would be very cross about!”
Humour is an important part of this book Oddie has been, after all, an accomplished comedian and comedy writer for 40 years.
“I’m very pleased when somebody points out that there is a lot of humour in the book,” he says.
The book deals with everything from his childhood in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, the beginning of his interest in bird-watching, his time with the Footlights Revue at Cambridge, and his long television career and his talents as a singer – he had five top-20 records.
Finally, I asked him what it is about birds that fascinates him and so many other people.
“I honestly think that it’s their accessibility,” he says. “I have thought about this a lot. “Birds are the most noticeable and endearing form of wildlife that is instantly there. They give us so much back. Most animals are pretty elusive and don’t sit there singing lovely songs to us, and don’t feed their babies in front of us. They deserve our attention.”
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