Richard Osman: ‘Women say I inspired their husbands to talk about food addiction’

“Normal. Is there any sweeter word in the English language?” sighs one of the characters in Richard Osman’s latest novel, We Chase Shadows. The word derives from the Latin “norma”: a carpenter’s square for measuring right angles. And Osman’s career in puzzle setting – be that on quiz shows like Pointless or his House of Games, cosy crime novels like The Thursday Murder Club or online voting systems to establish the nation’s favorite crisps – suggests a fondness for safe spaces in which reliable, right-angled rules apply. Sanctuaries to the “normal”. And indeed, across the half hour the 55-year-old Osman spends chatting to me from the back of a car on his way to a book signing in Wales, the word “normal” crops up quite a bit in the way he defines himself and his preferences. Although, as one of TV’s easy-going smart alecs, the producer-turned-presenter has infiltrated the ranks of our Oxbridge-educated national treasures, he still regards himself as a “small-town boy” raised by a single mum in Haywards Heath. He grew up watching “normal” primetime TV – Morecambe and Wise, The Dukes of Hazzard and snooker tournaments. He prefers “normal” bread to sourdough, which he says “lacerates the roof of your mouth. Why is that acceptable at breakfast?” Still, when it comes to his height, Osman is a not particularly normal 6ft 7in and self-identifies as a “reluctant lighthouse”. He’s struggled with an abnormal – or “shameful” – relationship with food since his father left home when he was nine. In an attempt to reduce stigma, he now speaks openly about his painful history of binge eating chocolate bars. “I don’t want to talk about these things, I really don’t,” he sighs. “It’s not comfortable.” But he tells me this is the subject people most often want to discuss with him in the street. “People… well, no, women come up to me and tell me their husbands heard me talking about it and then opened up about their own issues.”He believes that if he can “talk honestly about these moments when I’ve felt awkward and embarrassed and appalled at myself” then he can “stop the doom loop of shame, which makes everything so much worse because you become anxious about being anxious, depressed about being depressed…” Our line cuts out briefly, the Wi-Fi relieving the author of his stress around the topic. ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ has been adapted into a film by Netflix (Photo: Giles Keyte/Netflix) Osman’s mega success as an author – his sales exceed 17 million – probably has something to do with our collective yearning for normality, too. The appeal of crime stories lies in their neat restoration of the status quo. Sure, in We Chase Shadows, the second in his globetrotting We Solve Murders series, which followed his beloved Thursday Murder Club books, Osman chucks in the odd curve ball to keep us engaged. “I love introducing minor characters and letting them go off like hand grenades,” he tells me. But we know that, ultimately, the villains will be impounded and crumble will be served. The last boom in British cosy crime soothed readers during the rise of fascism in the 20s and 30s. The world order seems to be breaking down again. Is it any wonder that so many of us over the past decade have sought refuge in the Osmanverse, where characters of all ages, ethnicities, genders and faiths rub along without tumbling through the political fault-lines emerging in the society around us? Although Osman studied politics and sociology at Cambridge (from 1989 to 1992, to be exact), where he met his former Pointless co-host Alexander Armstrong, Osman has largely resisted commenting on politics. In a 2024 edition of his The Rest is Entertainment podcast, he argued that “nobody has ever given the first toss about anything anyone from the entertainment industry has ever said about any political issue”. This might seem outdated in a month that has seen artists divided over Ed Sheeran’s messy attempts to remain apolitical. But there’s evidence to suggest Osman is right when he says celebrity preaching seldom changes public opinion. “Nobody in the world has ever gone, ‘Before I vote, I just need to check on who George Clooney thinks I should vote for.’” Today he talks about the importance of games and sports and books as “lovely” release valves, which allow us to have “enormous arguments about things that do not matter”. He has fun picking absurd hills to die on “like mint choc chip being the best ice cream flavour”. Osman with his wife, Ingrid Oliver, when he was made an OBE earlier this year (Photo: Andrew Matthews/AFP) Osman was born in 1970 with an eye condition called nystagmus, which means his vision is blurred in a way he compares to “driving through dense fog”. He embraced the world through his ears, enjoying listening to TV and music (his older brother Matt is the bassist in Suede) but was “never a child who engaged much with the outside world”. He wasn’t a huge reader either, preferring to occupy himself devising games. In a 2022 appearance on Desert Island Discs he chose a pen, paper and dice as his luxury item, noting that he’d be “quite happy” entertaining himself with them. Speaking to me, he compares the act of novel-writing as “playing chess with myself”, although he stresses there is as much warm humanity as cerebral strategy in the process. “I do catch myself laughing out loud at things my characters do or say. I also make myself cry,” he says. He also experiences unexpected nocturnal bursts of inspiration. “I wrote an entire chapter at 3am the other day,” he says. “I had to tap the whole thing into the Notes app on my phone. Sometimes big thoughts just come to you in a moment, and you learn to embrace those moments. I went back to sleep at about 5.30, with my day’s work already done.” He’s proud that readers tend to find him by word of mouth. Recently he was delighted to meet “an RNLI officer who first picked up The Thursday Murder Club because he had to rescue a group of readers on a stricken ‘book group’ boat and they raved about it all the way back to shore”. The image of people all trapped – arguing – in a small boat reminds me that Osman is one of the creators of reality TV competitions. Back in the 1990s, when he was working at the Planet 24 TV production company, he came up with the idea for global hit show Survivor. In an appearance on JaackMaate’s Happy Hour podcast earlier this year, he described hearing colleagues discussing seeing a show featuring Joanna Lumley on a desert island and came up with the concept for his very own Lord of the Flies. “I wonder if every week, if you got around and decided to vote off the most useless person, I wonder what would happen,” he described himself thinking at the time. At 29 he joined Endemol, the production company behind Big Brother, eventually rising to become its creative director. Although that franchise is credited to Endemol co-founder John de Mol, Osman helped form and shape the concept. Having interviewed my share of traumatised reality TV show survivors, I ask Osman how the crueler aspects of the genre sit alongside his desire for people to get along without judging each other. He insists that, at its inception, there was a “purity” to the shows. Osman met his former ‘Pointless’ co-host Alexander Armstrong while studying at Cambridge (Photo: BBC) “The format says they must judge each other in the same way that a crime novel format requires the author to murder somebody.” But he argues that – with cameras or murders allowing us to pry, guilt-free, into the lives of others – they both serve the purpose of “letting human beings watch other human being in the wild. I’ve always thought reality TV was an incredible engine for empathy.” We Chase Shadows is amusing in its portrayal of the often humdrum lives of British gangsters hiding out in Spain and Italy. Our detective team pry into the black market in prescription pharmaceuticals, with one minor player running a racket in the kinds of non-prescription gummies that now claim to cure everything from insomnia and anxiety to hormonal issues. Osman takes magnesium to help him sleep, he says. But his addiction is still to sugar. “If they made heroin gummies I’d get hooked – but to the sweets and not the heroin.” Our call sputters out as Osman heads deeper into Wales. But he’s so happy to be heading towards a bookshop. His own literary tastes are – unsurprisingly – “normal”. His favourite author is global No 1 bestselling thriller writer Lee Child, although he’s also excited to get into the latest by Life After Life author Kate Atkinson. “I just love a good book,” he says, bluntly evangelical. “I can’t think of anything else you can buy for a tenner that will stay with you for the rest of your life. A whole world in your hand.” He says he’s seen an increase in the number of young readers in bookshops over the past decade. “The pendulum of culture always swings back,” he says. “Young people have had their phones saturated with this empty, monetised, AI bullshit for so long. Now they are realising that they can buy a real object written by a real person with a real brain and a real heart.” The line begins to crackle but he has time to offer words of hope. “The culture will heal itself,” he says. “Count me in!” ‘We Chase Shadows’ by Richard Osman is published by Viking, £25