Richard Osman on House of Games (Image: BBC)
Richard Osman’s House of Games needs a new name after its titular host announced he was stepping down from the BBC quiz show after more than 800 episodes – including the one where he met his wife. And while that might sound like an episode of Friends, it actually happened when actor and comedian Ingrid Oliver appeared as a guest on the show in 2020.
Fast-forward six years and they’re happily married, having reportedly snapped up an £8million home in west London. All of which seems perfectly par for the course for Osman, who seems to have effortlessly breezed through life without a care in the world.
Bestselling novelist, tick. TV host, producer and creator of Pointless, tick. Podcaster, tick. Cool brother, Mat, who plays bass in Suede, tick!
Oh, and if you’ve been off-world for the past 12 months, there was the film adaptation of his Thursday Murder Club novel produced by Steven Spielberg for Netflix and starring the likes of Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kinglsey.
It makes you wonder if there’s anything he can’t turn his hand to. Decorating, perhaps? All of which might be just that little bit galling if the multi-talented Osman wasn’t such a thoroughly nice bloke. Renowned for it in fact. Warm, genial, unpretentious and with absolutely no airs and graces despite his enormous success.
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Ingrid Oliver and Richard Osman attend The Thursday Murder Club premiere (Image: WireImage)
And to get a sense of just how successful he is, let this sink in. Last year, the fifth book in his Thursday Murder Club series, The Impossible Fortune, sold a staggering 391,429 hardback copies.
If you piled them end-on-end, they’d reach the top of Big Ben, probably! But you get the picture. That was 50,000 more copies than the next biggest-selling book, Frieda McFadden’s The Housemaid in paperback, and knocked the likes of Jamie Oliver, Lee and Andrew Child and Dan Brown into the shade (relatively speaking, they all sold tons of books, too, just not quite as many as Osman).
Since his debut book was published back in 2020, he’s become a fixture on the crime writing circuit, giving appreciative quotes to fellow authors for their covers, signing a gazillion copies of his books for fans, and generally being nice. In total, he’s sold some 17million copies of his books. Take that Booker Prize!
The author, who is 6ft 5in tall, quite literally looms large over popular fiction. And don’t go referring to him as a celebrity author, either. He’s nothing of the sort. He’s a writer through and through.
“There was never going to be a lifetime where I wasn’t going to write a novel,” he told me two years ago when we were chatting about his first standalone, We Solve Murders (clue, it’s another cracker).
“I was a journalist in my teens, and I wrote sitcoms. I was always a writer, really. And everything in between was an accident.” Including television.
Which brings us back to Osman stepping down from House of Games after nine years.
“It will no longer be Richard Osman’s House of Games. It will be somebody else’s House of Games,” he revealed on The Rest is Entertainment, the hit podcast he co-hosts with Marina Hyde. “And I gladly hand over the keys.”
He added: “I’ve loved it. And of course, I met my wife through it as well.” So TV viewers may mourn – but the good news for the rest of us is that it probably means more books. We can only hope.
I suspect Osman, 55, is a bit of a one-man Beatles, whose talent helps keep the British economy in funds with his exports, pays tons of tax to the Treasury, and is kind to animals. If only we could clone him!
