made a staunch refusal when he was asked to go on a show.
The former host, who quit the quiz programme in 2022 and left to find new co-hosts, headed on Who Do You Think You Are? to discover more about his ancestry.
But there was one thing Richard knew didn’t interest him – and that was researching his father’s side of the family. Richard’s dad walked out on his family after an affair when he was just nine years old, leaving Richard and his brother Mat to be raised by their mum Brenda Wright.
In the show, Richard didn’t delve into his paternal genealogy at all, explaining to Radio Times: “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.”
Richard’s father was David Osman, who left Brenda to attend teacher training college and raise her family alone.
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Richard Osman made a refusal on a BBC show (Image: Getty)
At first Richard would travel by coach from Sussex to Rugby to visit his father, but eventually cut the relationship off completely. After welcoming his own children, Richard and David made up – though things would never be the same.
Richard admitted on the How to Fail podcast that his struggles with food addiction can be traced back to his father leaving. He said: “I was in a lot of pain, clearly, but do you know what, I was nine, 10.
“I don’t want to be in pain particularly. I don’t want to miss my dad, I want to go, ‘This is okay, everything’s fine.’
“I was able much later in life to reconnect with the nine-year-old version of me, which is great. Reconnecting with a nine-year-old is really quite a good thing to reconnect with, because it’s really pure and funny and loving and curious and interested in the world. So it’s rather lovely I feel a connection with that nine-year-old.”
He added on Desert Island Discs: “My father left when I was quite young, when I was about nine. And that was probably the end of that innocence, I suspect.”