The Funky Goodie

Farewell to Bill...

BILL ODDIE

I can’t remember the first time I watched The Goodies. I must have loved it immediately because I was nine when it started and I stayed with it until almost the end (by the time it went to ITV I was a student with no TV set). It was the perfect show: three well-delineated cartoon characters – Tim Brooke-Taylor the dim patriot (and occasional fascist), Graeme Garden the mad scientist (and also occasional fascist) and Bill Oddie the anarcho-hippy, who was as much Beano as Woodstock (sherbet visions!) with a very simple set up – each week the “super chaps three” were hired by someone equally cartoonish to perform a task.

The comedy – like Warner Bros cartoons, like Mad Magazine, like Hellzapoppin’ – was slapstick and vaudevillian: there were references I didn’t get and references I did (Michael Bentine’s contemporary silent comedy clip show The Golden Silents meant that I got all the Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy steals in The Goodies), and there were a lot of visual gags – the diggers and cranes fighting like dinosaurs, the montages, and of course a giant kitten climbing the Post Office Tower. It was, unlike its adult near-rival Monty Python, genuinely entirely silly: John Cleese may have turned up in The Goodies And The Beanstalk to shout “KIDS’ PROGRAMME!” but there was a fierce intelligence and wit in Oddie and Garden’s writing (Brooke-Taylor didn’t write, which is maybe why many episodes feature him as the kid and Bill and Graeme as the mum and dad). Check out the astonishing episode The Movies, which is both a tribute to old Hollywood and a slapstick, fourth-wall-breaking masterpiece.

And then there was the music. Written (often with Michael Gibbs), performed and usually sung by Bill, the music, whether it was incidental or an actual song, was perfect: Oddie was young enough to have grown up with rock’n’roll, making him one of the few funny songwriters at the time capable of sending up rock and pop – listen to the immaculate Beatles parody Cricklewood, the insane heavy metal pastiche of The Troggs’ Wild Thing, or the hit single – because The Goodies had hit singles – Funky Gibbon (and buy the albums if you can: there’s so much untrammelled insanity there). Even the theme songs (especially the theme songs) were magnificent: bubble-gum rockers that would have been a hit in their own right.

And the books! The work put into The Goodies File and its successors was immense: like the Python books only without Terry Gilliam and with a smartness that sat in the previously-unoccupied no-man’s-land between daftness and wit. Many older people can still quote the White Christmas parody while for some, the phrase “at it like knives” is a password into a different kingdom.

The Goodies were huge: they’d come out of the Footlights, they’d done radio with Cleese, and they invented the still-running I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. Perceived issues with “outdated attitudes” apparently hindered repeats (which is sad, because Oddie in particular was attempting to satirise racism, and indeed the Goodies devoted an entire episode to beating up apartheid) but love for the show never died.

Post-Goodies, the superchaps found themselves forever part of the nation’s psyche: and Bill in particular crossed over to nature shows, where his love of animals (particularly birds) went curiously well with his occasionally difficult demeanour - on Springwatch, particularly, he was a welcome contrast to the “look, a robin!” school of presenting. An autobiography provided some of the reasons for that demeanour, but Oddie remained much-loved, if under-celebrated: until this century, when appreciation for his work came to the fore.

Bill Oddie was the anarcho-hippy, he was the nature-lover, he was a song-writer and a satirist, and he was brilliant.