Richard Osman: ‘I am essentially an 80-year-old woman in everything apart from my frame’

“I love, love, love doing nothing. Doing nothing is, quite absolutely, my state of grace,” says Richard Osman, 54, who, most days, is doing very far from nothing. When we speak, he’s just wrapped on 110 episodes of his quiz show Richard Osman’s House Of Games, is hosting The Rest Is Entertainment podcast with Marina Hyde each week and, during our conversation, is signing 5,000 copies of his new book, The Impossible Fortune. He admits he’s not wonderful at multitasking. “I’m good at monotasking. I’m good at focusing on one thing at a time, in extreme depth,” he says wryly, but even when scrawling his name on a perpetual loop, he still has an uncanny ability to answer every question put to him immediately, eloquently, without hesitation.

Born in Billericay and growing up in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, for most of us, for a long time, Osman was best known as Alexander Armstrong’s foil on BBC One’s Pointless, or for giving us 8 Out Of 10 Cats on Channel 4. Since 2020 though, he’s the man who brought Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim into our lives.

And now the Thursday Murder Club crew are back for a fifth stint. “I’ve given them a year off to rest and recuperate. I put them through quite a lot,” notes Osman fondly, calling his characters “four of his best friends”. “Things have changed a little bit for all of them.”

The book starts with a wedding, where someone comes up to enigmatic sleuth Elizabeth – who is grieving – and says, ‘Someone is trying to kill me. Can you help?’ Then adventure ensues, involving a “seemingly uncrackable code” and a “huge amount of money”, alongside themes of loss and friendship. “We never get out of grief ever, but we all have to, at some point, find a new way to live,” says Osman, of Elizabeth’s predicament. “It’s about being careful with each other, looking after each other.”

What was so refreshing about the Thursday Murder Club when it debuted was how Osman focused on older people, a group he considers “incredibly wise but also invisible”, making them the perfect crime-solvers. Older age still fascinates him. “When you are older, you are thinking slightly more deeply about life and what it means, and what grief is and what the point of it all is,” he says. Perhaps surprisingly, immersing himself in the trials of ageing doesn’t make him dread growing older. “I am essentially an 80-year-old woman in everything apart from my frame and so, I’ve never worried about that,” he says with a laugh. “None of us want to get ill. None of us want to go through grief. But that’s where we are. That’s the ridiculous planet we’re on and the ridiculous species we are. That’s what’s going to happen. But I like the idea of being older and giving less of a toss about what anyone thinks of me.”

He says he’s always felt very self conscious. “I’m 6ft 7in, and people [have] stared at me in the street my whole life. So I was always concerned about what people think of me and how people regard me.”

“There’s lots and lots of privations about older age,” he continues. “But it’s worth sometimes talking about the advantages of it as well, because there has to be something good about getting older, because it’s happening to all of us, every minute of every day.”

With more than 10 million copies of the Thursday Murder Club books sold, a big screen adaptation was inevitable. Nabbing British greats Celia Imrie, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren to play the quartet in the Netflix movie, directed by Christopher Columbus, is an incredible piece of casting, but Osman wasn’t worried he’d have the stars in his head when writing the next book. “Honestly, those characters are so ridiculously real to me that no one, not even the mighty Helen Mirren, can knock Elizabeth out of my head,” he says jovially.

With success often comes copycats and labels, which, Osman, almost unfailingly amiable and engaging, does hitch at slightly. He is not overly appreciative of his books being called ‘cozy crime’. “It’s an American phrase, really, and I get it, but I certainly think I don’t write it. I mean, such terrible stuff happens in my book all the time,” he says, with an edge of bemused defensiveness in his voice. “Hopefully, I write funny books that happen to be about murder.” In fact, he argues that Britain doesn’t “really have a cosy crime industry”, although booksellers and editors might disagree. On the subject of his striking book jackets being widely, and merrily ripped off, he clearly isn’t flattered, although conceals any annoyance well. “Do you know what, I might plead no comment on the whole area if that’s alright, thank you,” he says genially.

Such colossal success as his could derail some people, but dad-of-two Osman’s worth ethic is too strong. “Anytime anyone’s got a hit is great, but it mustn’t delay you for more than, like, five minutes,” he says. “Every single thing comes back to going back upstairs, sitting down and writing again. Nothing happens without you writing the next book. I love grafting. I love being paid, but I love doing a day’s work.”

His writing – bashed out upstairs at home, with the door shut unless his cats start yelling at him – is “really hard work” he admits with a laugh, comparing it with his “accidental bit of television presenting”: “That’s, I’m going to say, a fairly easy job.” Writing though is “thing I feel I was put on the earth to do. That’s the thing I started with when I was 15, and that feels like the thing I’ll finish with as well.”

The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman is published in hardback by Viking, priced £22 (ebook £11.99). Available now.