is he (Pointless)?
In 1984, Clive James tabled the Barry Manilow Law: no-one you know likes Barry Manilow, while the rest of the world worships the ground on which he walks. This adage can now be updated. Until very recently, I didn’t know anyone who had read Richard Osman’s books; I didn’t even know anyone who knew anyone who had read them.
But everyone else in Britain must have. He’s now sold five million copies of them, and at moments has enjoyed an almost Beatles-esque literary ubiquity, topping the hardback and paperback bestseller charts simultaneously. And like the early Beatles’ albums, he’s cranked them out at a prolific (and commercially auspicious) rate. The first of The Thursday Murder Club mysteries came out in September 2020, and the second almost a year later to the day. Right on cue, the third, The Bullet that Missed is out this week. And like its predecessors, it is set to be one of the bestselling books in British history.
The famous novelist who is famous for being something else — a newscaster, cook, or dress-designer — is no great novelty. And though he’s clear that he didn’t want to be seen as having “dashed out a celebrity novel”, Osman is clearly not in the writing game for the garret and the overdraft: his first two books went for a seven-figure advance. But while Graham Norton, Jeremy Vine and Richard Coles bashed it out, took the cheque, and returned to the loftier heights of their primary career, Osman has refused to stop writing.
If you’ve been entertained in Britain over the last 25 years, you’ll be familiar with Osman, whether you realise it or not. If, in the Noughties, you saw a deal-broking, sombre-talking Noel Edmonds conjuring numbers out of red boxes — Osman was behind the camera, as a producer. Or, if you only caught the aquatic soft-play of Total Wipeout or the “anarchic” nastiness of 8 Out of 10 Cats, go back and check the credits. Executive producer: Richard Osman.
But this was all mere preludial before Osman’s imperial, front-of-house period. First, still behind a desk if not behind the scenes, as Pointless’s toothy sage of arcane trivia, before spinning off solo with Richard Osman’s House of Games. And in the past few years, the written word has also become an integrated province of Greater Osmania. If you can clamber past the cardboard Osman display set in the Waterstones window, the life-size Osman cut-out in the doorway, you’ll find only pyramids of Osman hardbacks, themselves overshadowed by the broader Teotihuacans of shiny Osman paperbacks.
He was already on television every single day. The face and the name, every night of the week just around teatime — flick on the old crystal bucket and there he is, in the slot of warm, cuddly, wisecracking nerd. Like Stephen Fry, a camera-loving Cantab whose intelligence is attractive rather than intimidating — indeed, Osman is seriously fanciable according to various samples of “which celebrity d’you wanna shag” psephology.
Heat magazine’s weirdest crush (2011) has also been aided by a campaign of epic salesmanship. First the Tube posters, the chat show slots, the free books given away to NHS workers, and the personal “brand manager” appointed to Osman by his publisher. And then the blurbing splurge and the endorsements from Britain’s popular intelligentsia which gush across the covers of Osman’s books. Adam Kay (“achingly British”), Marian Keyes (“VERY funny”) and this slightly scary recommendation from Philippa Perry: “I didn’t ever want to finish this book!” It would be too easy to envy such a spectacle, and several reviewers have given into the temptation. But Osman’s success has rippled overseas (number two in Japan). He can’t be written off as some self-inflating industry balloon.
So what of the books? Like the rest of Osman’s oeuvre, they’re very entertaining, and make smart use of the winning ingredients of British popular fiction. The setting, Osman’s Hogwarts or Malory Towers, is one of Britain’s few remaining growth industries: an old-age home in Kent called Coopers Chase. Living there are Osman’s Famous Five — Ron, Joyce, Elizabeth and Ibrahim — who set up the Thursday Murder Club, an extra-curricular group dedicated to solving cold murder cases. They have help from local bobbies Chris and Donna, and shadowy figures from their own pasts. The result is something like a cross between The Archers and Spooks, with Elizabeth, a kind of female James Bond in retirement, lending proceedings a touch of Cold War, gun-in-the-handbag glamour.
Osman isn’t a multifaceted or complex writer. His villains stalk the night-terrors of the middle-class imagination: a drug baroness, teenage hoodlums, tax-avoiders and, most horrifying of all, a gauche property developer. And in the background lurk the clichés of broader thrillerdom: Colombian drug smugglers, the New York mafia, dodgy Albanians. This is all smoothed under a tone of relentless comic bathos, raising the stakes of a murder before dropping you back down to quaint, twee, pensioner earth. So, meet this fearsome former Russian spy, sometime head of the Leningrad KGB, who is on the phone to a call centre trying to get Virgin Media to show this week’s Bake Off. Or: on the road, racing after our perp — but can’t we please stop for the loo, my bladder’s really not what it used to be.
These deflationary gags, honed on the panel show, are good for a half-hour, not for 400 pages. It has been labelled “cosy crime”, godless and largely un-romantic. When sex rears its head, it keeps its hat on (all of Osman’s oldsters are rather horny, but only in the manner of a wistful dotage). Even his criminals hardly swear. In place of such grandiosity or indelicacy are jokes, daytime telly references, warmth, and a steady, mellow banality.
You can’t attain such heights of popularity without trouble. And while Osman would always face aesthetic attack (most crime novelists do), some suppose his popularity comes with political responsibilities. One notable attack from the Left accused him of a kind of bourgeois sentimentality, projecting a too-tranquil provincial England where the police aren’t corrupt or violent enough and which neglects the “cruel and authoritarian” truth of Conservative rule.
Whether or not the Kent police really need defunding, the Thursday Murder Club series is certainly not politically radical. From Agatha Christie onwards, as the historian Alison Light has argued, English crime has always contained a strand of deep conservatism, suspending a cyclical, domestic space of puzzles and resolutions at a safe remove from the anxieties of modernity. With Osman, this can be even more robustly applied. His pensioner-vigilantes are literally bubbled away from the threats of the contemporary world, even more so than Christie’s middle-class assassins. His goal is entertainment, not critique or attack. The “whip-smart” millennial novelist can angrily deconstruct online sexual politics as much as they like; in Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice, one of the inconsequential running gags is Joyce’s new Instagram account, @GreatJoy69, and the slew of unsolicited messages and pictures it attracts.
The truth is that Osman’s characters, readers and viewers are the same constituency: Britain’s comfortable gerontocrats. Everything that I associate with being and feeling modern — atomisation, digital culture, urban space, irony — is absent from these books. They’re not for me; they’re for the shrinking number of people who still reliably get their laughs and news from television. And Osman knows this is his gift. “My whole career is formats, really,” he told the Guardian, from Deal or No Deal to The Bullet that Missed.
The scale of his success tells us some things we know already: we’re getting older, we’re retelling the same stories, rehashing the same jokes. But it’s also a reminder that for the vast swell of people, a good time looks a bit like an endless panel show: inconsequential, cringey and hopelessly trite; but good-natured, and conscious of a collective national mesh of humour and sympathies which we are sometimes of in danger of forgetting.
That’s no reason to head out to mourn Western civilisation. The great hope for Osman’s books may be the news that broke soon after his first started breaking records: Steven Spielberg is to adapt it for the screen (producer: Richard Osman). In the hands of Spielberg — a technical master of his medium in a way that Osman will unfortunately never be — the true role of stories like this will become plain. Not to sermonise or uncover the economic basis of society, but to move and thrill the common heart.
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SubscribeAnd will she be handing back the money she made the from globalist, neo-liberal Goldman Sachs etc? Will the Clinton Foundation be compensating the families of the tens of thousands of Americans who died from opioids at least partly due to NAFTA.
I thought not. The Clintons make Trump look like Mother Theresa. And having got rid of him they are copying his policies. By God these people are evil.
Sounds like a rip off of Trumps America First agenda to me. America has given their power and influence away to China in less than 30 years. I dont see it coming back any time soon.
Yes they seem to be lurching from one policy to the next, first cancelling the pipeline and creating a lot of unemployment , then stating they must put America first. I don’t know how Hilary Clinton fits into this new regime as I thought she had lost fairly conclusively in 2016? I suppose she is younger than Biden-perhaps there might be a Trump v Clinton 2024 run for President?
This sad yet evil woman so desperately wants to remain relevant.
With no mention of her own involvement in the China policy of the past 30 years Were you really expecting self-awareness from Herself? China represents a vision of the fantasy US that she and other leftist control freaks have always wanted.
The economic logic of re-shoring would seem to hurt the Democrat’s middle class voting base. However, I suspect they’ll mitigate its impacts, by turning a blind eye to illegal immigration and using government money to pump up asset prices, for the asset owning classes, who vote for them.
It will sow the seeds of a future crash but will win elections, so they don’t care.
The economic logic of re-shoring would seem to hurt the Democrat’s middle class voting base.
The Dems have no use for such a voting group, as those people tend to have jobs and are not dependent on govt handouts. They’re not victims, they don’t go around breaking things and screaming.
You have a strange notion of who votes for Democrat candidates. For example, over 81 million Americans voted for Biden — is it your claim that they are all victims that go around breaking things and screaming?
I’ll answer this. Yes, because those who are breaking things and screaming are acting in what is held by the Bidens of this world (and their supporters) to be a ‘noble cause’, that is, of erasing the individual and his ‘rights’ and replacing them with duties towards the ‘collective’.
And what would the appalling Hillary Clinton, who has never done a day’s useful work in her life, know about ‘the means of production’? Of course, given her involvement in Libya and other similar ventures she knows quite a lot about ‘the means of destruction’. Will these people ever go away?
H Clinton lacks the moral gyroscope without which it is not possible to become a woman worthy of respect, let alone President of the USA. The fact that she failed, twice to become President. says much for the democratic system. I would not pay attention to, let alone follow, one word from this woman.
I’d have thought a lack of moral gyroscope would make one almost over-qualified for high office.
She is like a flag in the wind. Where is the humility? She can say – we got it wrong . I made a mistake. I could listen to that. But this pure plagiarism of Trump policy.
I don’t even like Trump, I like her even less.
Hello, welcome to just that choice that most Americans made in that election.
“Maybe some unintended consequence of war down the road.”
Clinton makes it sound so trivial.
Given Clinton is likely heavily involved in giving orders to Biden and well connected in Globalist circles, this is very important. I thought it was just me, but as others have said this is practically Trumpian.
Beggars belief that the only recent Clinton reference on publically funded BBC News is her exortation to throw more good money and American children at Afghanistan in the name of Who Knows What. As a preference to saying “We Screwed Up”, perhaps.
(As an aside, I agree with Clinton’s concerns about “many thousands of Afghans” who had worked with the US and Nato during the conflict and short of her proposal for “a large visa programme should be set up to provide for any refugees” – please God she means just the USA – I’ve no solution).
Anyway, well done Unherd in picking this one up.
I very much hope that Biden pays no attention to HC, and that the Clintons are not allowed anywhere near the White House.
Is she basically saying Trump was right?
Somebody earlier made a not unreasonable point that there is not much love being shown to Clinton in the comments.
My question to those that view her positively (and so follow her speeches more closely) is this – how do you square what she has said here, with your understanding of her position up to this point?
Then on to your point which is in what way does this materially differ (taking for granted that style and tone are very different) from what Trump has been saying since GE2016?
Free speech forever, sure, but there was no need to rebroadcast anything this appalling woman extruded. Bad judgement, Unherd.
Many days late and even more dollars short. Thanks, neoliberals!
Looks as though Hilary Clinton has few admirers on this site.
From their vehemence I’d be suspicious of how detached or neutral their viewpoint..
So people ignorant of all her years in the public eye should voice their viewpoint? This lady has a very public record to come to anyone’s conclusions about her.
Yes, it’s good not to presume what a person will say, but it is also good to listen to what they say, and what they have said, and to which audience.
Kick China out of the WTO, impose huge sanctions (like happened to South Africa with apartheid) that’s just for starters
One of the rew things I can go along with her on. See Nikki Haley – the first woman destined to be US President! – on PragerU extolling the same point. We minimised trade with Soviet Russia in order to frustrate their world domination attempt, with success. We now need to reverse our trade dependence on China for the same reasons.
In the 90’s Bill Clinton tried to bring them into the fold as did Bush and Obama. That failed. Problems could be big if Biden really does have interests in China. It is a relevant matter for investigation. The US security services need to get back to the day job.
Haley says, “Making America dependent on China for critical supplies didn’t happen by accident. It’s part of a strategic plan.” She then proceeds to insinuate that it’s entirely the fault of the Communist Party of China, when US companies were happy to stop producing these critical supplies, or to produce them in China, whenever they saw it as profitable. These Western companies are as much responsible for China’s edge over the West as the CPC, and they are equally as responsible for this strategic plan.
Not what she said in the vid. But her over riding point is that we need to treat the CCC like we treated the USSR. That means a total reversal of a great deal that has been accepted by all Western Democracies. It has massive implications across the board. And she is right.
If we’re talking about the same PragerU video, China – Friend or Foe, then “Making America dependent on China for critical supplies didn’t happen by accident. It’s part of a strategic plan” is exactly what she said, according to both the subtitles and my ears (01:42-01:50). She may be right about the need for Western disengagement, but her implication that China is solely responsible for this strategic plan is ridiculous. Western companies were not forced to cease production or move to China, and if the West continues to allow these companies free rein to pursue profits regardless of social costs, further problems can be expected.
Was that really Hillary saying that? Does she not know that our country was given to China by absolute power-seeking-regardless-of-cost-globalists? That would include David Rockefeller and every administration from Bush-Reagan until today with but one exception. That exception had his place taken, and I mean taken, by one who bragged about having the most fraudulent voting system in United States history at work for him. Orwell knew.
I would like to have my interview at the Pearly Gates just behind Hillary, just to eavesdrop on the codswallop she would spew. I would be waiting quite the while through her hearing. Ha. Then I would be sent down as well for my mirth and eye rolls, surely.
How naïve of Ronnie Ray-Gun and Tatcher to believe that the consequences of their moronic neoliberalism would be any different. Their governments never played fair in international trade, so expecting the Chinese to do it is downright pathetic.
It would be interesting to compare the economic cost of reestablishing western manufacturing systems to the obscene profits made by the “liberal industrialists” that were set free by Ronnie & Tatcher to sell the whole system overseas.
Even more amusing is the “cover” this ridiculous narrative that trade would liberalize China gave to the Americans who enriched themselves by offshoring industrial production at the expense of their fellow citizens in the working classes. Revolting.
When the facts change, the lady changes her mind. Which is entirely sensible. Well done, Hillary
Unfortunately she is always wrong.
Reshoring supply chains and taking back the means of production are a long way from challenging the economic model of “everything is a market” and things are only valuable if someone can make a profit from them.
Still, perhaps Ms Clinton is “on a journey” as they say. We must allow even those disliked by UnHerd to change.
Change begins by saying “I was wrong,” and you will never hear those three words coming from that evil person.
Unless she changes, perhaps?