BILL ODDIE had barely thought about the portrait of him painted for a reality television show eight years ago.
That was until it was revealed that the painting came with a sting in the tail.
The portrait painter Mark Roscoe admitted yesterday that he had included in the painting the shadowy form of a bird – a long-tailed tit – with its name in Latin alongside, in a pointed reference to the television presenter supposedly being long in the tooth.
But Oddie has cheerfully brushed off the insult, and turned the tables on Mr Roscoe with a humorous comment of his own.
“To be honest, if he was going to use a tit insult he might as well have called me a great tit,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.
Mr Roscoe, a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and a winner of the Ondaatje Prize for Portraiture, did not mince his words when he came forward to admit hiding the insult in his portrait of Oddie, a former member of the Goodies comedy trio.
He said: “Bill Oddie was a horrible person, quite awful actually, so I added a ghost of a bird with its name in Latin written alongside.” Mr Roscoe added: “I was testing his knowledge as an ornithologist. It was my cheeky way of describing him – something along the lines of a ‘long-tailed tit’, Aegithalos caudatus – as he was ‘long in the tooth’ and it sounded like a bit of an insult.”
The painting is from the 2007 BBC series Star Portraits, hosted by the since disgraced presenter Rolf Harris. Mr Roscoe was one of three artists who, in one episode, were required to paint Oddie. He added that there were other messages hidden within Oddie’s shirt, which he is keeping to himself.
Oddie said: “I don’t really take offence at it. If it makes him happy then fine. But as one artist said, it’s difficult enough to paint someone’s portrait without putting in silly little messages which people are unlikely to either see or understand.”
The wildlife presenter, known for his work on BBC’s Springwatch and Autumnwatch, was at a loss to explain why the painter would describe him as “horrible” and “awful”. “The only thing I may have said at the time about the Roscoe portrait could have been something along the lines of ‘that’s great, but it’s a little bit camp’, which in truth it is, with that toy monkey wearing a pith helmet and holding a pot of flowers.”
Mr Oddie is not the only figure of late to be the subject of a portraitist’s slyness. Last week, it emerged that the notorious blue dress worn by Monica Lewinsky during one of her and Bill Clinton’s White House trysts found its way into an official portrait of the former US president.
Nelson Shanks’s 8ft-high portrait depicts Mr Clinton leaning against a mantelpiece, with a mysterious shadow looming nearby. Mr Shanks has said the shadow was cast by a mannequin wearing a blue dress that he had set up in his studio while working on the portrait, but when Mr Clinton was not there.
Last week another leading artist, Daphne Todd, who was the first female president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, admitted that she had painted a pair of horns on to the head of an “obnoxious” young male sitter. “I painted hair on top but in future years these horns will bleed through,” she said.