Review: Unplucked by Bill Oddie

In Australia, Bill Oddie is best known as a comedian, actor and songwriter who found fame through the hilarious BBC television series The Goodies (a series that was repeated many, many times in Australia, but was never repeated on television in the UK until a few years ago.) In the UK, however, Bill Oddie is deservedly well known for his other career was a twitcher, or bird watcher, and has hosted numerous television series about bird watching and nature. Now in his seventies, Bill Oddie's latest work of non-fiction is Unplucked, a collection of essays, magazine articles and blogs that all focus on his work as a twitcher, as well as offering the odd hint of autobiography. 

A laid back and interesting read, some of the articles are quite amusing (such as the one about the tiger,) many others explain various tidbits about birdwatching in a way that is both interesting and accessible to readers like myself who don't know all that much about the native birds of Great Britain, or the particulars about bird watching. Although there are hints of autobiography in there, this book is not intended as such--indeed, Oddie released his autobiography One Flew Into the Cuckoos Egg several years ago. There is also more than a mention of mental illness and bipolar disorder, which, undiagnosed for most of his life, led to Oddie being sacked from a popular nature television series, which became a major career blow. 

Ultimately, Unplucked is an enjoyable and accessible read that may inspire fits of laughter ... and a bout of birdwatching.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more