Television presenter and author Richard Osman has spoken about his challenging upbringing, revealing how he used his career earnings to support his mother Brenda after his father walked out on their family when Osman was nine years old.
Osman explained that his father David announced an extra-marital affair before leaving the family in Sussex and moving to Warwickshire with his new partner, leaving his mother to raise the children without money or freedom.
Speaking to The Times, Osman said: "I’ve made sure my mum doesn’t have to struggle, because she struggled forever. It’s freedom, money. Because I didn’t have freedom and anybody who grew up without money knows that."
He added: "I’ve got more money than when I was growing up, that’s for sure. I’ve made sure my family are safe and secure."
Following the split, Brenda, who is now 84, took a range of menial jobs to support the household before training as a primary schoolteacher. She now lives in a retirement home in Sussex, a location that provided the inspiration behind Osman's hit book series The Thursday Murder Club.
Severed family ties
After his father left, Osman explained that his father's side of the family cut off all contact with Osman and his relatives. However, Osman noted that his maternal family helped fill the gap.
"It’s OK. The other side of my family more than made up for it. They’re a lovely bunch. We fetishise our family a bit," Osman said.
The quiz show host described his father leaving as the worst thing to ever happen to him. When the two met 20 years later, they failed to bond, leaving Osman with no desire to explore his paternal ancestry when he appeared on the BBC genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are? in 2022.
"My dad's side of the family wasn't something I was interested in because that's not the family I grew up in. It would, in a funny way, be like learning about strangers," he told Radio Times.
Instead, Osman shared a close bond with his maternal grandfather, Tom 'Fred' Wright, saying on the show: "So much of what I am I owe to him." Osman added that he would have loved to follow in his grandfather's footsteps by becoming a detective. Osman grew up alongside his older brother Mat Osman, the bass guitarist for the rock band Suede.
Coping with childhood trauma
Osman has also been open about how his father leaving triggered a shameful and bizarre four-decade battle with food addiction, which he used as a coping mechanism while growing up without an adequate father figure.
Reflecting on the emotional toll during an episode of John Robins' How Do You Cope? podcast in April, Osman described the experience as traumatic.
"It's difficult to put yourself back in your nine-year old brain. What do you know when you're nine? Nothing, but you know family, and you know that there's a certainty when you go home, and that's ripped from you, so that would be a trauma for certain," he said.
He explained that growing up in the 1970s meant emotional distress was rarely addressed: "I would say that I didn't deal with that trauma. This happened in the 1970s, which was a very different time, and it wasn't the done thing to talk about it. So long as I looked OK, that was OK for everyone else."
Osman recalled how he suppressed his pain: "I was able to subsume it, put it to the back of my brain and not deal with it in any way; the more modern thinking is that's not very healthy. But I've always had a very quick brain so I was able to find routes through this pain I was feeling and through this betrayal that I felt, and show a face to the world that was comfortable, and happy, and secure, and bits of me were, but it catches up with you."
He said that he was finally forced to confront the issue as an adult: "I would say in my late twenties and early thirties, I'd run out of road with this new person I'd created, this person who was able to hide from pain and run from pain, and tell a different narrative. That was gone, so I had to deal with it then because I didn't deal with it when I was nine, because how could I deal with it when I was nine?"
