The 55-year-old former Pointless star and Thursday Murder Club author announced his departure from the BBC quiz show in March, with Sheen set to take over on the programme in September.

Osman told the Radio Times: “We do 110 (episodes of House Of Games) a year and it knocks me out for a couple of months where I can’t write, but I didn’t want to leave and the show be taken off air, because there’s this amazing team and I love them all.

“So I’m chatting to the producers, saying, ‘can we find some sort of succession thing the BBC will be happy with, so I can bow out and you can all carry on?’, and I thought, ‘it’s going to be quite tough’.

“But we’re chatting away and someone says, ‘oh, Michael Sheen would like to do it’, now, normally when you say you’re quitting, everybody says, ‘oh my god, don’t go, we’ll really miss you’, but this time they’re all like, ‘oh that’s really good, we’re really looking forward to Michael Sheen’.”

Osman went on to say that there would be an on-screen handover to The Damned United actor Sheen, which he said would be “a bit like one of those Easter egg scenes in the superhero movies, only you don’t have to sit through eight hours of credits to get to it”.

Osman quit as the co-host of Pointless in 2022, after 13 years, so that he could focus on writing.

Since 2020, Osman has written his Thursday Murder Club novels, publishing its latest edition The Impossible Fortune in September last year, having released The Thursday Murder Club (2020), The Man Who Died Twice (2021), The Bullet That Missed (2022), and The Last Devil To Die (2023).

The full interview with Osman can be read in the latest issue of Radio Times and on the publication’s website.