Richard Osman, the TV quizmaster who keeps leaving television to write murders

Richard Osman

Photo: TimDuncan / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 28, 1970 Billericay, Essex, England
Occupation	Television presenter, producer and novelist
Awards	Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), 2026 New Year Honours

Some television goes unnoticed until it disappears: the teatime quiz that runs five days a week, the format so smooth that nobody sees the joins. Richard Osman spent most of his working life building that kind of television, and for years he was content to stand beside it rather than in front of it. What stands out now is how often he has chosen to leave it. He stepped away from Pointless, the show he invented, to write novels. This year he handed over House of Games, the show that carried his name, for the same reason. And yet when Netflix needed someone to explain why the best darts player in the world was more likely than not to lose a fortune, it called him.

The Thursday Murder Club, his first novel, turned a former television executive into the author of one of the fastest-selling debut crime novels Britain has seen, and every book since has pulled him a little further from the studio. The instinct underneath both careers has not changed: Osman thinks like a format designer, who knows exactly where a viewer or a reader is about to drift and puts a twist just before it.

Billericay, in Essex, is where he was born on 28 November 1970, but the place that shaped him was Haywards Heath in West Sussex, where he grew up after his father walked out when Richard was nine. His mother, Brenda Wright, retrained as a teacher and raised two boys on little money; the elder, Mat Osman, became Suede’s bass player. As a pupil at Warden Park School in Cuckfield he contributed to a music show on BBC Radio Sussex, then went on to read politics and sociology at Trinity College, Cambridge, between 1989 and 1992. One of his contemporaries there was Alexander Armstrong.

His first career was entirely behind the camera, at Hat Trick Productions and then Endemol UK. He created and wrote the Channel 4 sitcom Boyz Unlimited with David Walliams and Matt Lucas in 1999, and served as executive producer on 8 Out of 10 Cats and 10 O’Clock Live. As Endemol’s creative director he oversaw shows including Deal or No Deal for Channel 4.

Pointless came out of a pitch meeting. Osman took the idea to the BBC’s daytime executives and, in the demonstration, played the assistant who sits next to the host. They kept the assistant. From 2009 he sat beside Armstrong, jokingly billed as the host’s “pointless friend”, explaining which answers a hundred members of the public had failed to think of. It ran for more than 1,300 episodes with him at the desk. The nystagmus that limits his eyesight means he cannot read an autocue, so he learns his lines by heart.

Richard Osman’s House of Games, launched on BBC Two in 2017, was the purer expression of his taste: four famous contestants a week, deliberately daft games, prizes stamped with his silhouette. It passed 800 episodes and introduced him to the actress Ingrid Oliver, who came on as a contestant. They married in December 2022.

The fiction began with visits to the retirement community in Burgess Hill where his mother lived. The Thursday Murder Club, published in September 2020 after Viking won a ten-publisher auction with a seven-figure offer, sets four pensioners loose on cold cases in a Kent retirement village and then hands them a fresh body. It sold almost 700,000 UK copies in four months and beat Barack Obama’s memoir to the top of the Christmas chart. The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet That Missed and The Last Devil to Die followed a year apart, the last of them reaching number one on the New York Times list. In 2022 he left the daily Pointless to concentrate on writing; in 2024 he opened a second series, We Solve Murders.

Not everyone welcomed him. Part of the books trade read the first novel as a case study in what was wrong with publishing: a seven-figure advance for a famous face, unlikely to earn out, and review space that might have gone to debut writers from independent presses. Osman said he did not want to be seen as someone who had dashed off a celebrity novel, and the sales soon made the commercial objection look premature. The literary argument is harder to close. His books are warm, plot-driven entertainments with a joke on most pages, built, like his quiz shows, for people who might not otherwise pick one up. Chris Columbus’s 2025 Netflix adaptation, with Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley, showed the limits of that gentleness: some critics found it charming, others felt the starry cast could not give it much pulse. The cosiness that sells millions of copies is precisely what his detractors point to.

This year completed the turn. In March, on The Rest Is Entertainment, the podcast he has co-hosted with Marina Hyde since 2023, he announced he was leaving House of Games after nine years: “It will be somebody else’s House of Games and I gladly hand over the keys.” The BBC gave the show to Michael Sheen, whose episodes began airing in October. In May he collected at Windsor Castle the OBE awarded in the New Year Honours for services to literature and broadcasting, and in September he published We Chase Shadows, the second We Solve Murders novel, a year after The Impossible Fortune, the fifth Thursday Murder Club book.

Then, on 30 October, he turned up on Netflix. For the live special Beat Luke Littler, in which 20 challengers each had a single leg of 501 to beat the world champion for £501,000, Osman sat alongside host Gary Lineker as the numbers man. Weeks earlier he had worked through the odds on his podcast: Littler might win any one leg against players of that standard about 85 per cent of the time, but his chance of getting through all 20 was closer to 15 per cent. On the night, Fallon Sherrock won her leg in 15 darts and took the money. It was a very Osman outcome: a format in which the improbable becomes likely, and a man at the desk who had said so in advance.

Away from the cameras he has two children from an earlier relationship and has spoken openly about a food addiction he expects to manage for the rest of his life. The next move is already on paper: a sixth Thursday Murder Club novel is under contract, with no publication date announced. For the first time in almost two decades, there is no daily quiz waiting for him when he finishes it.

Tags: TV presenters, Beat Luke Littler, Michael Sheen, Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club, Alexander Armstrong

Related People

Related People

Discussion