While some of the old Footlights team went off to form Monty Python, Oddie - together with Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor - created The Goodies.
It featured three characters on their "trandem" who pedalled about offering themselves for hire with the tagline "We Do Anything, Anywhere, Anytime".
This spawned a series of comical situations, much slapstick and the use of fairly primitive special effects, mainly sped-up film.
One of the memorable episodes was Kitten Kong, in which a giant feline toppled the Post Office Tower. A version of this episode won the Silver Rose at Montreux TV Festival in 1972.
Oddie composed a number of comic songs for the series, often parodies of contemporary pop music. The most successful, Funky Gibbon, reached number four in the UK charts and the trio performed it on Top of the Pops.
Forty years later, the track was re-released and the profits given to a campaign to preserve the primate's habitat.
The Goodies ran on BBC Television for most of the 1970s, eventually transferring to ITV for a short - and less than successful - period.
The show became cult viewing in Australia - and the team reformed to tour the country in 2005 - but the BBC never repeated it in the UK, something that annoyed the three performers.
Garden eventually went on record to suggest that the lack of repeats was punishment for the trio's "disloyalty", saying in 2020: "It seems they've held that grudge ever since."
Oddie and Garden also co-wrote the scripts for many of ITV's Doctor in the House comedy series. But Oddie's childhood interest in ornithology had never waned and, by the mid 1970s, he was developing a career as a naturalist.
He made guest appearances on several programmes including Animal Magic. And the humorous style of his Little Black Bird Book, published in 1980, made it a bestseller.
"Bird-watchers are tense, competitive, selfish, shifty, dishonest, distrusting, boorish, pedantic, unsentimental, arrogant and - above all, envious" he wrote.
"At the time I was flabbergasted, " he said in a 2015 interview, external with the Independent.
"But a year later, I was diagnosed as bipolar. I thought back. If I knew then what I know now, I'd have accepted that I was going through a manic phase."
The audience missed him. Before he left, the show had averaged 3.19 million. After he left, that figure fell to 2.55 million.
Oddie later revealed his condition caused him to try and take his own life.
In 2020, he announced that he had been severely ill as a result of lithium poisoning: a treatment aimed at stabilising his moods.
He later posted on social media that "the past few years have been grim for me.
"Lost enthusiasm, but I am still here."
His outside interests included music. He once did a spell as a radio DJ playing jazz and his house contained his collection of thousands of CDs.
Oddie was also a passionate supporter of the Green Party and gave his time, and fame, to bolster wildlife charities such as the RSPB.
His 1967 marriage to the musician, Jean Hart, ended in divorce. In 1983, he married Laura Beaumont, who had previously worked with him on a number of projects.
Oddie was a true polymath, a man who seemed to make a success of everything to which he turned his hand.
But it was his conservation work that gave him the most satisfaction. "Wildlife," he said, "has long been a refuge - probably more than I realise."
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