Pointless star Richard Osman reveals childhood trauma that led to four-decade addiction battle
Richard Osman has revealed how his childhood trauma led to a four-decade battle with addiction. The TV presenter and best-selling author opened up about struggling with a food addiction, triggered by his dad leaving the family home when he was nine years old.
The Pointless co-host told the How To Fail podcast: "It’s so ridiculous, this food stuff. Alcoholics will tell you the same, like it’s absurd that there’s a bottle of vodka in front of you or there’s a packet of crisps in front of you and it’s more powerful than you. It makes no sense. People are very judgmental in this world.”
The father of dad-of-two, added: "I think, ‘How can you judge anyone in this world and how they behave, or how they act, or what their instant reaction to something is when you are less powerful many times in your life than, like, a big bar of chocolate in front of you?’
“We’ve all got human minds and we’re all crazy in slightly different ways." “That’s my version of it since I was probably nine years old. It’s been absolutely ever-present in my life — weight, food, where I am in relation to it, where I am in relation to happiness because of it, hiding it." “All of that stuff, it’s been absolutely like the drum beat of my life.”
Richard told host Elizabeth Day how he was left traumatised after his father told him at the age of nine that he’d been having an affair.
His dad then walked out of his childhood home in West Sussex. Richard travelled to Warwickshire by bus to see his father but soon cut ties.
Richard’s father later came back into his life, after Richard became a dad himself. The Thursday Murder Club book series writer shared: "By and large, addiction is running away from your pain. I was in a lot of pain, clearly, but do you know what, I was nine, ten . . . ‘I don’t want to be in pain particularly, I don’t want to miss my dad, I want to go, this is OK, everything’s fine’.
“If you start going away from your true north, who it is you actually are, the further you get away the bigger leap you have to make back. And so anything that can stop you thinking or numb you, or anything like that, is incredibly useful to you, because if you start thinking, you think ‘Yeah, but hold on, maybe I do miss him’.
“Then you go, ‘Hold on, there’s some food in the fridge, I’ll have that’. Nine-year-old me and a different version of me sort of converged at the age of nine and the bit of me that converged was fuelled by food and fuelled by secrecy and fuelled by sha- me and all of those things.”
The star revealed that he's received therapy to cope with the addiction, saying: “I don’t have any personal shame anymore. Addiction is shame. You’ll over-eat, you’ll feel shame about that. Shame makes you over-eat. It’s a spiral. So you have to learn to absolutely just cut it off at the source, and if you do feel shame, just to go, ‘That’s all right’ because shame leads to more shame.
“I have to accept that it’s not embarrassing. If people really told you their secrets, everyone on the street, we’re all f***ed. We’ve all got terrible things, we’ve all got stuff that we just think is crazy.
“That is because we are all human beings. I was able much later in life to reconnect with the nine-year-old version of me, which is great. Reconnecting with a nine-year-old is really quite a good thing to reconnect with, because it’s really pure and funny and loving and curious and interested in the world. So it’s rather lovely I feel a connection with that nine-year-old.”
