One Flew Into The Cuckoo's Egg by Bill Oddie
| One Flew Into The Cuckoo's Egg by Bill Oddie | |
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| Category: Autobiography | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: The life of the ex-comic musician, turned ex-comic, turned birdlife fanatic, in an inimitable style, which he deserves, if the details that get left out don't. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 320 | Date: September 2008 |
| Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton | |
| ISBN: 978-0340951927 | |
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Bill Oddie doesn't want to write his autobiography. He is not near the end of his life, and he doesn't have anything to sign off on, as it were. Nor can he write it – if these days are anything to go by, you have to be thirty or less and have had a couple of years in the limelight to qualify for one, and not the career-spanning decades of fame Bill has under his substantial belt. Still, our heroic narrator has managed to produce this book, which is to all intents and purposes an autobiography, but not as you know it, Jim.
The first major subject is the very small collection he has of memories of his mother. To fans of Bill, and to those who remember his episode of the Who Do You Think You Are? genealogy series, this is not terribly new, but it does serve repeating. The glimpses he has left in his very pictorial memory of the woman he never could go to for succour, or love, or even a touch, are instead full of mystery, and no small sense of mistrust and dislike.
This comes from a nicely vivid use of the more everyday autobiographical detail many people will recognise – the ad hoc games of footie and cricket on the nearest open ground, the schoolboy fights. There is a lot to be said about having a book concentrating more on the subject of Bill and his mother, and the decades of searching for a clear definition of what was ailing her, but Bill doesn't want to write one.
Instead, after a third of the book covering the past and present of his feelings – there is a lot of detail of subsequent delvings into the Oddie family background that the television programme enabled – Bill takes on the task of redressing other prior sins. Namely the heinously repetitive interviews he has suffered in his life, and about his life. So we read two hundred pages of Bill talking to Bill, in alternating fonts, about the main points of what it is being an Oddie.
Thus we start with what he might have inherited from various strands of the family – his artistic, musical and personal characteristics – and pass through farting to his first career, as comedic songsmith. It is generally a second chronological look at Bill's public life, but tending towards the previously unknown (his first homosexual kiss – which was seemingly his last, too, and with a very clear motive behind it) and that which nobody has thought to ask him about before.
There is one small section where the current crop of celebrity books does come in, but in a much more interesting way. If one is twenty or so, and has spent six months getting a ghost-written book about you on paper, the writing of that should with all honesty surely feature. And so too here does the book become self-reflecting, and discuss its own making. For Bill has also had his own personal problems with depression. He's never one to openly state that all comics have their dark side, or some such blundering cliché (and these days does not call himself a comedian at all), but he does openly put on record the horrors it has led to, and one such instance interrupts his self-questioning flow.
The book then is as self-aware as its author, and the astute reader will also be made very aware of what is happening off page. There is very little about Bill's private history, such as how his first marriage collapsed, and he met wife number two. There is very little to suggest anything post-Goodies that concern Tim and Graham, his colleagues on the show that made him a household name (and allowed him to be the eighth biggest-selling songwriter in the UK in 1975). I remember the other two twinning up for a naff quiz show, while Bill's public profile was dimming, but Bill doesn't.
What is here is Bill as he would like to be known – which the talking-to-himself style allows as probably no other. We get a lot of Bill's character, his not infrequent F-words, his admissions of his own personal flaws – his occasional short temper with fans on the street or inept organisers of his one-man shows. It's not an abrupt warts-and-all approach, and it won't shake anybody from their love of his past or present careers, but it is apparent, and comes across with nice subtlety as well as in the more bluntly confessional.
What we do get is Bill defending his decisions more than is necessary. Of course he has been subject to the same few questions several times over, and Bill wants us to know he's bored by such. He also wants us to make note of previous books about his career, his ornithology, his relationships and travels, and even though some might not actually be in print, we are guided in their direction to save him from repetition.
Thus, though this book remains the volume Bill clearly wanted to write at this juncture, it is by no means a definitive biography. It doesn't suffer from any of the trappings of the genre, a bland formulaic look at select highlights, by any means, but nor would it fully satisfy people coming to reading about Bill for the first time. There is a place in the market for another to put everything together, and the careers of Bill Oddie do deserve such.
At the same time Bill has certainly earned the right to produce this book as he deems fit. It's not an outstandingly put together book – a couple of tiny repetitions might niggle (especially the mistaken belief that Eastenders has ever been on in the pre-6pm news slot). It is a nicely balanced guide to Billness – whether concentrating on the Cambridge Footlights, or his lifelong love of birdwatching, or his obvious love for the females in his life (his daughters and family, I mean). Or indeed the mother and son sharing some form of depression. Bill noticeably uses the Churchill metaphor, of the Black Dog.
I myself can take or leave birds and the watching thereof, and never did like the slapdash slapstick of the Goodies. All the same, Bill is a personality I can easily admire – the authoritative old-school character, blunted by his rough-round-the-edges northern-ness. He will never be pigeon-holed into the cocoa-and-slippers TV bracket, however many ducks he watches. I can only guess, but I think he comes across very evenly and realistically in this book, and although I was made very aware of its self-editing, I was very happy to read it. Fans would feel even more amenable, even if, like me, they felt a lack that a more detailed recreation of his life would have avoided.
I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to The Bookbag.
For another autobiography of the larger-than-life we can cautiously recommend Prezza: My Story: Pulling No Punches by John Prescott.
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