I like what Stewart Lee said about Bill Oddie today:
So sorry to hear of the death of Bill Oddie, a towering polymath who could have been a great jazz musician, but settled for being a brilliant comedian.
The brutality of some of the Goodies‘ skewering and surreal social satire makes some episodes of their innovative and inspirational TV shows all but unbroadcastable today, and there, always chugging away in the underlay, are Bill’s brilliant jazzy funky scores.
A superb musical parodist – his pastiche of Joe Cocker singing the folk song On Ilkley Moor B’ah Tat is pin sharp and hilarious and joyously absurd – he is also responsible for one of the great British funk singles, Funky Gibbon.
Often described as ‘spikey’ by the public, I suspect Bill was in fact a sensitive man who sometimes found the endless presidential air he was required to sustain by members of the public approaching him a hard act to keep up all the time. Bill, in whatever context, was never anything else but himself.