Thursday Murder Club’s Richard Osman claims he turned down Celebrity Traitors

Thursday Murder Club creator Richard Osman has claimed he turned down the chance to appear on The Celebrity Traitors.

The 54-year-old said he would have only appeared on the first celebrity edition of the BBC reality gameshow if he could have been guaranteed to be a traitor, with the show set to launch on October 8.

When asked if he was invited to take part in the series, Osman told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “I was, everyone who’s been on Celebrity Traitors won’t tell you anything.

“Normally people will say if they’ve been on Celebrity Catchphrase, they go, ‘I’d watch that I think I did quite well’, Celebrity Traitors, nobody is saying a single word.

“I’ve been working with Celia Imrie, and she won’t say anything about what happened, none of them will say.

“I love Celebrity Traitors, but I said I would only do it if I could be a traitor.

“Only because I couldn’t bear if I was a faithful – that thing where you go back to your room at night and you’re just lying there, and you know that there’s three people up in that tower filming, having a load of fun wearing cloaks and filming something.

“I’d be lying there just going, ‘well, I mean, I could be murdered any second’, I wouldn’t have that control, and obviously they can’t say, ‘yes, you can be a traitor’, so yeah, I’m just going to watch.”

The programme will see 19 famous faces – including Thursday Murder Club star Imrie, retired Olympic diver Tom Daley, and actor Sir Stephen Fry – gather in the Scottish Highlands for the chance to win a cash prize of up to £100,000 for a charity of their choice.

Osman was later told that he could now never appear on the show as everyone would know he was a traitor, to which he replied: “Am I double bluffing?”

The show sees contestants try to detect the traitors in the group while completing a series of challenges to win funds to contribute towards the prize pot.

If at the end of the series a traitor is left among the finalists, the faithfuls, those who are not traitors, lose out on the money and the traitor wins the full prize.

Osman also went on to say that he would “definitely not” appear on the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, despite calling it a “beautiful bit of television”.

He also refused to speak about a follow-up to the Netflix film adaption of The Thursday Murder Club, but claimed it was “the most requested sequel in Netflix history”.

Osman was promoting the latest book in the Thursday Murder Club series, The Impossible Fortune, which was published on September 25.

The TV presenter has so far released four books in the series – The Thursday Murder Club (2020), The Man Who Died Twice (2021), The Bullet That Missed (2022), and The Last Devil To Die (2023).

Osman became a household name on Pointless before he left the hit TV quiz show in 2022 to concentrate on writing, having co-hosted alongside Alexander Armstrong since its debut in 2009.