Obituaries 23 RENOWNED ORNITHOLOGIST AND COMIC ACTOR WHO STARRED IN THE GOODIES Bill Oddie BillOddiewasamemberofcomedy trioTheGoodies,whoseanarchicTV sketchshowairedinthe1970sand 1980s.Photograph:IanGavan/Getty Born: July 7th, 1941 Died: July 25th, 2026 Bill Oddie, who has died aged 85, was a multitalented 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 Pythons Flying Circus with silly sight gags. Oddies self-taught musical skills steered the trio into the charts with his compositions pastiche rocknroll songs such as The Funky Gibbon and Nappy Love. And when that was all over, he carved out a new career as the small screens most famous birdwatcher, credited with encouraging new generations to become enthusiasts for the natural world. Oddies 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, Im Sorry Ill Read That Again, which ran for six years from 1964. After the first year, Oddie was joined as the shows regular scriptwriter by Garden, a later Footlights recruit. When its successor, Im Sorry I Havent 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 childrens 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: Its not. I always said I wouldnt do it and I wont. His family eventually persuaded him to go ahead with the show and it was screened early the following year. Bill was born in Littleborough, outside the Lancashire mill town of Rochdale, to Lilian (née Clegg) and Harry Oddie always had a reputation for being a bit grouchy and famously refused to be featured on This Is Your Life Oddie. He was brought up from the age of six in the Birmingham suburb of Quinton by his father, who broke out of his familys 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 miscar- ried 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 Edwards 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 Clubs annual reports. 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 childrens books and television programmes. He also played drums in her band, Too Many Westerns, and together they wrote for ITVs anthology series Dramarama, aimed at young viewers. 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 Oddies Little Black Bird Book (1980), Birding with Bill Oddie (1997) and his autobiography, One Flew into the Cuckoos Egg (2008). 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. THE IRISH TIMES Weekend Saturday, August 1, 2026 DavidSedarisontheseriousbusinessofcomedy.Page8 WalledtownsofIreland:RositaBolandvisitsWexford.Page10 PatrickFreyne:GlenHansardwasIrelandsbandleader.Page5 WEEKEND THE IRISH TIMES Saturday, August 1st, 2026 A WOUND IS HEALED Afterdecadesofheartbreakandnearmisses, Mayofinallyhasitsmomentinthesun By 2 Cover story A HOUSE OF PAIN NO MORE MayosAll-Irelandtriumphreleased75yearsof pent-upemotioninoneunforgettableafternoon ByKeithDuggan M acHale Park in Castlebar has always been best suited to those Saturday-night matches in winter, when the season is young and the promise uncontained. An ideal Cover story meme, the jokes came thick and fast. Through all that, Mayo footballers and supporters never shied away from speaking about it, nor returning to All-Ireland finals. Maybe we make too much of the football, Fr Leo Morahan, the former county board executive, said back in 2007. Mayo has the 4 Cover story 2004, when he was beginning his sec- ond term as Mayo manager. By September, he had the county back in an All-Ireland final, when Kerry defeated his young team. Like most GAA counties, the network of names and connections within Mayo football are impossibly dense: you could fill the People GLEN HANSARD WAS OUR NATIONAL BARD TheFramesfrontmanwasIrelandsbandleader, anditfeltlikehewouldbedoingthejobfor alongtime ByPatrickFreyne I n the 1990s, I wasnt convinced by The Frames. They felt a bit mainstream. A bit major label. I was a young idiot. Later, a friend convinced me that I 6 Music THE PIANIST WHO PLAYS WITH ONE HAND ONLY Freya Terris is the first pianist to pass their Grade 8 piano exam playing solely with their left hand ByJohnOConnor L ike countless other young musicians, Freya Terris discovered her love of music at the piano stool. 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Initially, a strait running between the two main islands was named after him and, by 1765, the Falkland Islands had become the English name for the entire 22 Obituaries FIRST WOMAN DIRECTOR OF A NATIONAL INSTITUTION, LIBRARIAN AND ACADEMIC Patricia (Pat, Patsy) Donlon Born: January 28th, 1943 Died: July 23rd, 2026 Patricia (Pat, Patsy) Donlon, who has died peacefully aged 83 at Blackrock Hospice, Dublin, was a leading light in that remarkable generat Obituaries 23 RENOWNED ORNITHOLOGIST AND COMIC ACTOR WHO STARRED IN THE GOODIES Bill Oddie BillOddiewasamemberofcomedy trioTheGoodies,whoseanarchicTV sketchshowairedinthe1970sand 1980s.Photograph:IanGavan/Getty Born: July 7th, 1941 Died: July 25th, 2026 Bill Oddie, who has died aged 85, was a mul 24 Last word DAVID McWILLIAMS ThefirstvictimofAI? Theeconomy W e are in an era of great technological advances, or so say all the tech bros who are championing not just AI, but a whole host of technological innovations from finance and healthcare to supply chain management and communications. In