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Richard Osman reflects on House of Games exit: “I didn’t want to leave and the show be taken off air”
Richard Osman is hoping for another Christmas bestseller – but why did he have to give up presenting House of Games?
Kate Green/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA)
- Ed Grenby
Published: Tuesday, 1 September 2026 at 10:00 am
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This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
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My finest hour was when I beat Barack Obama,” says Richard Osman. More accusations of rigged presidential elections? A clandestine quiz-off with the former Potus on the set of Pointless? A bare-knuckle bar-room brawl? No, Osman is talking about the coveted Christmas number one position on the book charts: in 2020, his first Thursday Murder Club novel pipped Obama’s A Promised Land to the top spot. “And I’ve always wondered if someone told him that, and therefore that Barack Obama has heard my name…”
If he hadn’t heard it then, he must have done now: Osman has sold nearly 20 million books; seen the first one filmed for Netflix with Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley and Pierce Brosnan; and is now two tomes into a second series of gentle, funny crime novels that Netflix is adapting on an even grander, starrier scale than before.
His new one, We Chase Shadows, is out this week, but faces stiffer Christmas competition than from a Nobel-winning politician: this “super Thursday”, when book publishers release what they hope will be their biggest gifting-season hitters, Osman goes head to head with Julia “Gruffalo” Donaldson (Osman’s comment: “You could not meet a nicer person in the world than Julia. It would actually upset me if I sold more than her”); Jamie Oliver (“Jamie’s all right for money, isn’t he? I mean, he doesn’t need any more. He’s fine. He can look after himself”); and Gillian Anderson’s second collection of women’s sexual fantasies, More (“Christmas comes but once a year, but I’m not sure that’s true with Gillian’s erotica book”).
Nadia Jae, Steen Raskopoulos, Richard Osman, Nigel Planer and Tamzin Outhwaite on this year's House of Games BBC/Remarkable Television/Graeme Hunter
Beyond the saucy puns, however, Osman is absolutely serious: writing novels is no mere hobby for the brains behind House of Games. In fact, he’s just given up the latter, after 800 episodes, because “we do 110 a year and it knocks me out for a couple of months where I can’t write”. He knew he needed to quit, he says, “but I didn’t want to leave and the show be taken off air, because there’s this amazing team and I love them all.
“So I’m chatting to the producers, saying, ‘Can we find some sort of succession thing the BBC will be happy with, so I can bow out and you can all carry on?’ And I thought, ‘Hmm, it’s going to be quite tough.’ But we’re chatting away and someone says, ‘Oh, Michael Sheen would like to do it.’ Now, normally when you say you’re quitting, everybody says, ‘Oh my god, don’t go. We’ll really miss you.’ But this time they’re all like, ‘Oh that’s really good. We’re really looking forward to Michael Sheen!’ ”
So is there some kind of on-screen handover, where Osman’s features morph into Sheen’s, like a new Doctor Who? “We absolutely discussed that – we thought we’d get me to turn briefly into David Tennant, then David into Michael – but the budget wouldn’t run to it, so we just do a nice little post-show skit between the two of us. It’s a bit like one of those Easter-egg scenes in the superhero movies, only you don’t have to sit through eight hours of credits to get to it.”
Budget’s not such an issue when you’re writing a book rather than filming a show, fortunately. We Chase Shadows is a sequel to 2024’s We Solve Murders, and the pair exist because Osman “wanted to write something that was a bit more global, and more thriller-y. I wanted people to be able to jump out of aeroplanes or fire submachine guns, which the Thursday Murder Club [based in a Kent retirement home] can’t really do.
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“If they’re a bit more Agatha Christie, I wanted to take the same, very British sensibility and humour, but fly it around the world and see if it would work with something a bit more James Bond-y. But what hopefully goes across all my books is the idea that we can make unlikely friends, find new loves and adventures and found families.”
He’s succeeded on both counts, of course (he wouldn’t have sold 20 million books otherwise). We Chase Shadows is set in an utterly delightful world where international criminal masterminds still nick a couple of creme eggs from the corner shop when opportunity arises, and where a team made up of a glamorous millionaire, her bodyguard and the latter’s New Forest-based father-in-law come together, touchingly, to pursue those international criminal masterminds.
(Ask him who he sees playing those roles once Netflix’s cameras start rolling, and he insists “I don’t know what my characters look like. I think it’s because I’m so visually impaired, I just don’t see the world that way.”)
If he does get another “Christmas number one” certificate to sit on the mantelpiece beside his previous three – and his OBE and Heat magazine Weird Crush Award (“Those two are really, really similar,” he jokes, “and they were both handed to me by the Princess Royal”) – it will surprise precisely no one. Except, perhaps, Barack Obama.
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Authors
Ed GrenbyAssociate Editor, Radio Times
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