House of Games star Richard Osman is one of British television’s most familiar faces, but he’s not the only famous one in his family.
In fact, Richard’s older brother is Mat Osman, the bassist of Britpop heroes Suede – and one of the founding members.
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Mat Osman
Mat formed Suede in 1989, and stayed with the band until they broke up in 2003, at which point he began making music for TV shows. When they reformed in 2010, he joined back up with his bandmates, and he’s still in the band as one of only two founding members alongside lead vocalist Brett Anderson.
While it might appear that the brothers went in rather different career directions, they’re both authors, too.
Mat was the London editor of email magazine le cool, and he’s written for newspapers including The Guardian, The Independent, and The Observer.
He published his first novel, The Ruins, in 2020, and his second, The Ghost Theatre, last year.
Richard called his brothers work “genius”
When Mat went to speak to Virgin Radio about the book, he brought Richard, three years his junior, with him. And Richard said about his brother’s work: “It’s so brilliant. The writing is extraordinary. It’s so lyrical, it’s about Shakespearean London. There’s sorts of chase sequences, all sorts of stuff going on. The writing is so beautiful, but you have to keep turning the pages. I think it’s a work of absolute genuine genius.
“All the way through, you’re taken into a world, you feel like you are in Elizabethan London. You’ve got these incredible characters, you’ve got these incredible ideas. And you’re immersed completely in this world and in these characters. And the way he describes the sights and the sounds and the smells of a place, it transports you.”
Mat said about his writing career: “I don’t know why I didn’t do it earlier, because I spend so much of my life in hotel rooms and planes and buses and stuff. And nowadays, all I do is write, that’s what I do. I wish I’d started 20 years ago.”
In the same interview, Richard said: “I went into television because that’s how my brain works. That boom, boom, boom, entertain, entertain, entertain, keep people reading. Mat went into music, because that’s how his mind works, which is passion and expressing yourself and trying to bring beauty out of chaos. And that’s how the books read, I think.”
Richard Osman’s House of Games airs weekdays from 6pm on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer.
