RICHARD Osman has revealed he created the world’s most famous reality show — but has never made any money from it.
The TV genius, 55, is the brains behind BBC gameshows Pointless and House of Games and has produced the likes of Deal or No Deal and The Million Pound Drop.
While he’s now a multi-millionaire, thanks in part to the incredible success of his Thursday Murder Club book series, Richard could have been a whole lot richer if he’d been remunerated for an idea early in his career.
In an appearance on JaackMaate’s Happy Hour podcast, Richard explained how the first show he ever came up with was Survivor, or Lord of the Flies as it was then known.
He said: “I’ve never made a penny out of it because I left soon afterwards and all of that. I’m proud to see where that’s gone.”
When the hosts quizzed why he hadn’t earned anything from it, Richard said: “Well, because I’ve got a contract that says everything I do belongs to them.”
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Without specifying the contents of his messages, Richard said he had written to the show’s owners “a couple of times”.
In a thinly-veiled barb at rights holder Castaway Television Productions, which is now owned by the Banijay Group, Richard said: “Listen, I get it. And I’ve done all right for myself. It’s so much better not to be bitter. So much better just to go, that’s fine.
“That beautiful house you have that was bought off the profits of Survivor? That’s absolutely fine. You go right ahead.”
The original concept was devised in the 90s when Richard was working at production company Planet 24.
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Richard explained: “Charlie Parsons, who ran that, said, oh, we saw Joanna Lumley on a desert island. Can we do a show on a desert island?
“And I went away and I thought… I wonder if every week, if you got around and decided to vote off the most useless person, I wonder what would happen.
“So I thought, oh, we’ll do that. Why don’t you do that on a desert island? So you’ve got a desert island, you get the big mouths and the loud mouths and the people who sort of want to be in charge of all the meetings.”
Turning his attention to its genre-defining vote-off element, Richard said: “And if you were allowed ever in life to just go, you know what? We’re going to vote off the most useless person in this office, we’re going to vote off the most useless person on this island. I thought, well, what a power that would be.”
For all of his success on the small screen, Richard said it’s his murder mystery novels, which have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, that is the thing that excites him the most.