Daily Mail, May 19, 2007

HEADLINE: Springwatch saved my sanity;
Bill Oddie's hit nature programme helped him bounce back after a breakdown. But this year, when he went in search of spring, he found he'd nearly missed it.

No one could have predicted it, least of all Bill Oddie himself.

He has been a cheerful presence in our living rooms since the days of the 1970s TV comedy team, The Goodies, before re-emerging as a seemingly bumbling yet actually wonderfully authoritative nature presenter.

Then he reached his 60s and suffered a nervous breakdown, which resulted in a short stay in a psychiatric hospital followed by long bouts of therapy. He has talked about this 'absolutely catatonic' period in his life with candour.

Nowadays, however, he seems much happier as he chats at breakneck speed in his cluttered north London home and which viewers may also sense when they watch him in the new series of the nature programme, Springwatch, which starts later this month.

'I think I am happier,' he agrees after a pause, startled at the realisation. 'I am certainly more fulfilled.' He puts this largely down to Springwatch itself. 'I love doing it my energy and brain have more to work on than they did,' he continues, his eyes fixed on a small screwdriver with which he fiddles incessantly when not scratching his beard or rubbing his forehead.

The series, now in its third year, has been a huge success, regularly pulling in audiences of four million. But his satisfaction has more to do with the fun of making the programme; of being on location at the Devon farm where the series is filmed with a 100-strong production team, who are as dedicated to the project as he is.

Even so, filming Springwatch is relentlessly demanding. In each series, Bill and his copresenter Kate Humble broadcast the show live for an hour each day for three weeks from an isolated barn. There is hardly any escape offcamera, either, since they both stay at the same hotel. So, do they love or loathe each other?

'Obviously, half the men in England envy me having Kate there. I can honestly say there are no terrible frictions. She is pretty good at keeping it to herself when she is annoyed. But I am very paranoid; I always assume I have annoyed her if she seems to be in a bad mood.' Although their other co-presenter, Simon King, shares plenty of time on air, he is almost never with Bill and Kate in the barn, as he is reporting from far-flung locations, such as Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, off the east coast of Scotland.

'Last year, he was stuck on that rock in terrible weather and frankly there was nothing to see except gannets,' says Bill.

Subject to the maddening whims of the wildlife they are filming, Bill and Kate often let off steam by using toy puppets to enact scenes that would outrage the censor. 'It is usually to do with cooking them and hunting them,' confides Bill. One puppet that comes in for particular attention is Jelly, the wild-haired character with the squeaky voice who co-presents the children's version of Springwatch on CBeebies with Bill and other guest naturalists.

'David Attenborough and I have this intense rivalry about which of us Jelly prefers,' says Bill. 'David may not thank me for telling you this, but one time we were stuck in a corner at, of all places, St James's Palace, obviously having a heated debate. I imagine people were thinking it was about global warming or something like that, but, in fact, we were discussing which of us Jelly preferred.' The new series of Springwatch follows the tried and tested format with Simon being shipped off to the Scottish island of Islay, and Bill and Kate presenting the 'wildlife soap opera' from their Devon barn.

When he is pressed on which animals will be this year's stars, Bill looks blank: 'I wish we knew.' This spring has been the warmest on record, and has caused a crisis. When Bill went to the farm in early May, he realised spring had arrived three weeks before the series was due to begin.

The flowers and trees were unfurling, and the wildlife was way ahead of schedule.

'I rang the producer and said we should start filming immediately,' he says.

'Imagine us starting on 28 May and saying, "We're terribly sorry, but we seem to have missed spring"' The kingfishers, who have a camera fixed inside their nest, and who were poised to become this year's stars, have already had their chicks, like many of the other birds that the Springwatch team usually rely on, as good filming fodder. As a result, they have to trust to luck that the tits, swallows and swifts will all produce second broods of chicks, to coincide with the broadcasts.

In fact, the swallows and house martins had not nested at all. 'I am quite glad that it has rained at last, because the ground was getting very hard,' says Bill. 'They simply couldn't find any soft mud to build their nests. They arrived on 20 April and they were there, skimming around, but not nesting.'

So could global warming kill off Springwatch for good? Bill hesitates for the first time, not because he doubts for a second the veracity of climate change, but because he believes that discussing it within the context of the show is not appropriate.

'Global warming was the theme two years ago and we had a lot of pressure to show graphs and all that. But Kate and I both said that's not why people watch the programme. And ultimately, I feel that what is wrong with the world goes way beyond natural history.' He squirms on the sofa, before unleashing a torrent of fury at what he sees as the real source of the world's ills Tony Blair, America, the war in Iraq, oil. 'It's not just global warming the greatest threat to most habitats, in my view, is politics on a grand scale.

'If I do an interview while Springwatch is being broadcast, and I'm asked about war as well as what we can do to encourage more bees into the garden, I just say I love wildlife, but that I love human life more. That is the message I want to get over that helping wildlife to flourish is part of a much bigger scheme, which is to save life on earth for human beings.

'I often feel that people think that if they put up a nestbox and plant some trees, everything will be fine. I don't want to be a harbinger of doom it's not my job, and certainly not the topic for a progamme like Springwatch but if you ask me whether I want to save the whiteheaded duck or stop the killing in Iraq, I know which one I would choose.' But you won't be hearing any gloomy diatribes on Springwatch. 'I'll stick to the blue tits,' Bill promises. It is an act of self-censorship and maybe also of self-protection, because for Bill Oddie, with his heartfelt political views, Springwatch is even more of a comforting sanctuary than it is for the rest of us.

Springwatch begins on 28 May, 8pm, BBC2.