Alexander Armstrong (Hey Alexander narrator, 2020-1)
David O'Doherty (House of Games Night bandleader, 2021)
Remarkable Entertainment (part of Endemol Shine Group) for BBC Two, 4 September 2017 to present
as Richard Osman's House of Games Night, BBC One, 20 November 2020 to 5 November 2021 (12 episodes in 2 series)
Four celebrities are given quizzy things to do by Richard Osman.
A selection of four celebs take on rounds of quizzes, always with a twist. Some are general knowledge questions where the answers rhyme. Some are general knowledge questions where the answer is an anagram of part of the question, or found in the contestant's name.
Other rounds are more inventive. We might see the initial letters of a song lyric, in the original rhythm. Another round - played in pairs - invites guesstimates for a number and takes the average for the pair.
There are visual rounds, locate an item on a picture, or place somewhere on a map. And every show ends with "Answersmash", blending a picture with a definition.
Crème caramel Giedroyc.
The show is impeccably cast: two men, two women. At least one familiar to the older viewer, at least one modern comedian from Mock the Week, at least one family entertainer. Richard Osman asks questions written with verve and wit.
A daily prize is drawn from the House of Games stall of stuff, with the winner lifting the House of Games Winners' Trophy.
Daily prizes: Lightshade, umbrella, shoehorn, binoculars, water bottle, all branded with the show's logo.
We like this show a lot, it hits just the right notes for 6pm - and other hours, at least one UKGS editor shifts episodes till late evening, go to bed with a smile. ROHOG (as it became known) effectively replaced Eggheads, running for twenty weeks in the autumn and winter.
A series of House of Games Night ran in late 2020, effectively a timeshifted (and timestretched, in that it ran over five weeks rather than five consecutive nights) version of the main series. A six-episode Night series was broadcast the following year, with panels playing three shows each. These had a small studio audience (some of whom had things to do as part of certain games) and the introduction of David O'Doherty as nominal bandleader and foil to Osman; critical consensus was that the latter episodes lost some of their sparkle.
Angela Scanlon throwing her stylus at Rick Edwards after he insulted her.
Michael Buerk threatening the involvement of the European Court of Human Rights after Elis James deluded him by confusing Dick Turpin and Dick Whittington during The Nice Round. To make matters worse, Elis won that show by one point, so Buerk may well have dipped out on a prize as a result…
Nick Owen asking his wife what prize she wanted. Aw.
The Reverend Kate Bottley literally hissing at Joel Dommett and John Thomson during YolanDa Brown's Highbrow/Lowbrow question after they put their fingers on their buzzers. Not so much The Reverend Kate Bottley as… ah, you're ahead of us.
Kemah Bob's tour de force appearance as guest, including squealing with genuine delight whenever she got an answer right.
Dara O'Briain instigating Sian Gibson and Sindhu Vee into sabotaging Ed Gamble's go at The Nice Round variant Get Your Head in the Game, only to lose a point after Osman let Gamble take a point off a player of his choice.
The unexpectedly titanic battle between polymath University Challenge captain Bobby Seagull and boyband singer Jay McGuiness from The Wanted, which McGuiness won!
It's not uncommon for guests to donate their prizes to other panellists, but it would be hard to top the utter heartwarming joy of Thanyia Moore when, after coming dead last with a score of zero in one of her "redemption week" episodes, she was gifted the coveted deckchair by her namesame Glenn Moore. Awwww.
On one 'Champions Week' edition, a game of You Spell Terrible sneakily asked the players to spell three different variations of the same word (in order Palate, Palette and Pallet) but only Stephen Bailey did so successfully.
"What a week we are having!" - possibly not even a deliberate catchphrase, but this has become a stock line in Richard's intro any day but Monday, often with an adjective slipped in before "week" so it becomes "great week", "exciting week", "fun week" or whatever.
Marc Sylvan is credited for "Music".
Generally aired at 6pm, the then-traditional Eggheads slot, with the exception of assorted year-end Fridays, where the monopolisation of the 6pm slot by It Takes Two forces them back to 7pm. A couple of episodes have aired on Saturday when live sport airs during the week. The penultimate episode of series 3 was put back to 6.30pm as a consequence of Covid-19.
Billed in some sources (and indeed on-screen) as Richard Osman's House of Games.
The first two series were recorded at The Hospital Club, a basement studio in Covent Garden. Production shifted to BBC Scotland for series 3 and the first five episodes recorded for series 4 (Shaun Williamson's week) before moving to Riverside Studios as another consequence of COVID-19. Guests in the fourth series were spaced two metres apart, and answers for some games were sent to the contestants' tablets rather than passed out on little cards. The trophy was also not passed down the line to the winner (neither were the paddles for the "Is It Me?" game, which was a rather surprising inclusion anyway as (i) the game appeared to have been retired after series two, and (ii) the questions were recycled from the House of Games quiz book published in 2019). Oddly enough the show did retain the swapping of positions for pairs rounds (although you could argue that none of the games really required it) but cunningly cut away at that point so that we didn't see the production staff in masks and gloves physically move the chairs, allowing everyone to stay in the same literal seat throughout. More frivolously, the pandemic gave rise to a running joke that the prize shampoo doubled as hand sanitiser, though this still didn't convince anyone to take it.
Series 6 onwards included weeks where non-winners returned - the first was initially described as "second place, second chance" week, until Osman came up with "redemption week", on the spot, about 30 seconds into the first episode, immediately decided it was a better name, and never mentioned the original branding again.
Angela Barnes and Jay Rayner are the only contestants to score the maximum 24 points across the week; Barnes would eventually be beaten by Beattie Edmondson in a Champions week. Nina Wadia, Jay Blades, Ade Adepitan, AJ Odudu, Karim Zeroual and Patsy Kensit have all scored the minimum 6 points across regular weeks; Brian Conley scored six in a festive week and Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock scored six in a Champions week. Sindhu Vee scored five across three Games Nights. Scarlett Moffatt is the contestant with the most failures, with four wins out of fifteen, though Darren Harriott, Thanyia Moore, and Michael Buerk are the only contestants to play ten episodes and lose them all; African football on his Redemption Week's Wednesday meant that Buerk's failure was exacerbated by him being unanimously booted off the Weakest Link first little more than two hours later.
Across the first six series (plus the peak-time spin-off), the most-awarded daily prize has been the wheelie luggage which has been chosen 61 times, ahead of the dartboard (the only prize to have been offered every single week since the start) on 53, fondue set (45) and toolbox (33). At the other end of the scale, many prizes have never been chosen at all - and let's face it, when are you ever going to wear House of Games cufflinks? [For the House of Champions week, of course! - Ed.] Prizes chosen only once include the roller skates (won by Danny Wallace and gifted to Suzi Ruffell), biscuit tin (Rufus Hound), hip flask (Richard Herring), fedora (Amanda Abbington), football (Sara Pascoe), playing cards (Natasha Raskin Sharp) and yoga mat (often picked out as a favoured prize at the start of the show, but only Joanne McNally has actually taken it home). You can also add the jigsaw, which Elis James was gifted for his daughter (he couldn't decide between that and the toolbox). The specials have featured some unique prizes: the eggcups and table tennis bats and ball were both unique to the first series of House of Games Night and now in the possession of Jennifer Saunders, series 2 awarded a beer keg and karaoke machine to Ed Balls (which he donated to a care home he is involved with) and Champions weeks have given a pocket watch to Kate Williams and a set of goblets to Gregg Wallace.
Two for the matches and dispatches department; Bill Turnbull made his final TV appearances on the show in October 2021, and Osman met his wife Ingrid Oliver on the show. The latter caused some head-scratching for the producers - normally, one half of a married couple would not be allowed to be a contestant on the other's show. The BBC board concluded that "the prizes on House of Games are so insignificant" that they would make an exception, allowing Ingrid Oliver to play in a champions' week.
Series seven included a week with comedian Chris McCausland, who is blind, as a panellist. A few games, such as "Where is Kazakhstan?", "Z to A", and "I Am Not a Robot", were off-limits for obvious reasons but the only major change was that "Answer Smash" used song clips instead of pictures. As it turned out, the week was more notable for the rivalry between Malorie Blackman and Matt Dawson, with two days going to tie-breaks and another being decided on the last question. Adjustments were also made for partially-sighted S9 contestant Josh Pugh, who can use the tablets up-close but cannot read the studio screen. Future Out of Order host Rosie Jones, who has cerebral palsy, played in S7: games requiring fine motor skills (most obviously "Where is Kazakhstan?") were not played, and she was able to use a touchscreen keypad to type rather than write her contributions to "Distinctly Average" and "The Nice Round".
Speaking of making allowances for competitors - or not doing so - it has been suggested that always having the buzzer on the contestants' right puts left-handed guests at a disadvantage. We don't know if anyone's crunched the numbers on that, but it did seem particularly harsh on athlete Lauren Steadman, who has a partially-formed right hand. There's always the option of a handheld buzzer, used by Sewing Bee judge Esme Young when she had sprained her wrist, and by journalist Nikki Fox, a wheelchair user whose elevated position placed the big red buzzer awkwardly out of reach.
Despite Richard always mentioning that sports people are particularly competitive, it bears noting that in fact they often prove to be among the most laid-back players on the show - and in the first six series, the only one to actually win a week was sometime competition dancer Kevin Clifton. (However, sports presenters often do prove to be both highly competitive and good at the games: Mark Chapman, Colin Murray, Chris Hollins and Jason Mohammad all won their weeks, and Clare Balding came second in a well-matched battle with Mike Wozniak, but went on to win her "Festive" champions week.) Curiously, sports stars suddenly came into their own in series seven, with Sam Quek, Adam Gemili and Sir Chris Hoy (whom Richard delighted in pointing out was "the first Knight of the Realm on House of Games!") all winning their weeks. But Richard's oft-made observation that stand-up comics tend to do well is a truism; it has not gone without notice that many of the rounds are based on wordplay of some kind and so naturally suit people who make words funny for a living.
The same series that featured Sir Chris Hoy as the first Knight of the Realm to appear, also featured the first Dame, Tanni Grey-Thompson, who appeared on screen the week after Hoy. At least two other contestants have been so honoured since their appearances: Denise Lewis appeared in 2020 and was made a Dame in 2023, and Maggie Aderin-Pocock appeared in 2020 and in a Champions week in 2022, before receiving her damehood in 2024. Grey-Thompson outranks them all though, as she's also a Baroness.
House of Games "Question Smash" book
Richard Osman's House of Games party game