Some of you will know Bill Oddie from The Goodies, others will know him from I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again and you might even know of Oddie from his nature series or bird books. He’s done quite a lot of things over the years and is a very big part of my childhood. I used to watch The Goodies and when I found they’d put some of their best episodes on DVD I bought them, made the big mistake of watching them with the kids around…actually I made the big mistake of trying to watch them while working. That was not going to happen, I found myself watching the whole lot and getting absolutely no work done. They’re just as good today as they were in the 1970s, very relevant. When I found Oddie’s autobiography I absolutely had to have it, it was one of those must buys and must keeps.
It’s a fabulous little book, at 308 pages it’s nowhere near long enough for me. I was absolutely fascinated. Oddie talks about his mother and how she spent some years in a lunatic asylum and didn’t really have a relationship with her. He talks about his father and how much of a saint he thinks the man was, he refuses to say anything bad about him. He talks very frankly about his depression and that was really fascinating to read. Not an easy part of his life and it must have been challenging to write down but I’m so glad he did. He completed the book with a series of questions and answers with his alternative self.
When I picked it up I expected a well written book with some interesting anecdotes and hopefully a better insight into the man I admired so much. While I got all of this there’s so much missing, I understand you have to stop somewhere but I wanted so much more. In the question and answer section Oddie digressed so many times and it was just interesting to see where he digressed to but his alter ego pulled himself back to the thread of the discussion just as I was getting more involved. While the initial question was something I was interested in and wanted to know about, I was also intrigued by the digression and wanted to follow that line of thought further. I put down this book yelling “more, more, encore”…not really, I put it down very annoyed there wasn’t more and then went to sleep.
This book does beg the question…at what point does one stop an autobiography? In Oddie’s case, just as this particular reader is getting annoyed at having so few pages to go. In other cases it’s just at a particular point in their life. I just want to know how do you know when to stop?
I suspect there’s some swear words in here but I can’t remember any as I was concentrating on the book. I suspect there’s a typo but it could just be that I’ve got the wrong singular spelling of Goodies and don’t ask me why I typed that statement, I don’t have an answer.