Richard Osman leaves House of Games as an absolute famous person | Books | Entertainment | EUROtoday

Richard Osman’s House of Games wants a brand new identify after its titular host introduced he was stepping down from the BBC quiz present after greater than 800 episodes – together with the one the place he met his spouse. And whereas which may sound like an episode of Friends, it truly occurred when actor and comic Ingrid Oliver appeared as a visitor on the present in 2020.

Fast-forward six years and so they’re fortunately married, having reportedly snapped up an £8million residence in west London. All of which appears completely par for the course for Osman, who appears to have effortlessly breezed by life with out a care on this planet.

Bestselling novelist, tick. TV host, producer and creator of Pointless, tick. Podcaster, tick. Cool brother, Mat, who performs bass in Suede, tick!

Oh, and in the event you’ve been off-world for the previous 12 months, there was the movie 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 surprise if there’s something he cannot flip his hand to. Decorating, maybe? All of which is perhaps simply that little bit galling if the multi-talented Osman wasn’t such a totally good bloke. Renowned for it in truth. Warm, genial, unpretentious and with completely no airs and graces regardless of his monumental success.

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And to get a way of simply how profitable he’s, let this sink in. Last yr, the fifth guide in his Thursday Murder Club collection, The Impossible Fortune, bought a staggering 391,429 hardback copies.

If you piled them end-on-end, they’d attain the highest of Big Ben, in all probability! But you get the image. That was 50,000 extra copies than the following biggest-selling guide, Frieda McFadden’s The Housemaid in paperback, and knocked the likes of Jamie Oliver, Lee and Andrew Child and Dan Brown into the shade (comparatively talking, all of them bought tons of books, too, simply not fairly as many as Osman).

Since his debut guide was printed again in 2020, he’s grow to be a fixture on the crime writing circuit, giving appreciative quotes to fellow authors for his or her covers, signing a gazillion copies of his books for followers, and customarily being good. In complete, he is bought some 17million copies of his books. Take that Booker Prize!

The creator, who’s 6ft 5in tall, fairly actually looms giant over fashionable fiction. And don’t go referring to him as a star creator, both. He’s nothing of the type. He’s a author by and thru.

“There was never going to be a lifetime where I wasn’t going to write a novel,” he informed me two years in the past after we had been chatting about his first standalone, We Solve Murders (clue, it’s one other 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 now not be Richard Osman’s House of Games. It might be any individual 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 might mourn – however the excellent news for the remainder of us is that it in all probability means extra books. We can solely hope.

I believe Osman, 55, is a little bit of a one-man Beatles, whose expertise helps preserve the British economic system in funds along with his exports, pays tons of tax to the Treasury, and is form to animals. If solely we might clone him!