Richard Osman’s final House of Games week is all comedians – and Michael Sheen takes over

The four chairs for Richard Osman’s last week of House of Games have gone to comedians. Chortle reported on 23 September that Miles Jupp, Cariad Lloyd, Lucy Porter and Kiell Smith-Bynoe “will be the last to face Richard Osman”. He steps down at the end of next week’s episodes. For nine years the show has been one of the steadier bookers of stand-ups on British television, and it signs off the Osman run with four of them on the buzzers.

It’s also, for the four of them, five broadcast appearances out of a single day’s work, and that ratio is the part worth explaining properly. The format turns one day of a comedian’s availability into a week of airtime.

Four guests, five shows, one day in the studio

The structure is fixed and has been since the show started on BBC Two on 4 September 2017. Four celebrities play across five consecutive daily episodes. The show’s Wikipedia entry is plain about the production reality: “A week’s worth of shows is recorded on a single day, so the celebrities are booked for only one day, changing outfits between shows.” If you have ever wondered why someone’s jacket changes but their haircut doesn’t across a Monday-to-Friday run, that’s why.

Dirty Feed’s production write-up on the programme put the logic in the flattest possible terms:

you only need to book each celebrity for a single day’s recording, and you get a full week of shows out of them

For a working comic chasing television credits to shift tour tickets, that ratio is unusual. A panel show taping costs you an evening plus a prep day and yields one broadcast, where this gets you five. Daytime quizzes repeat, too, so the same footage keeps surfacing on iPlayer long after the outfit has gone back in the wardrobe. The show has run 845 episodes by the series-by-series count on its Wikipedia page, which is a lot of guest chairs filled since 2017.

When does the new series start?

The new run launches on Monday 28 September at 6pm on BBC Two, according to the listing reported by TV Zone. Six o’clock being roughly the hour at which most of the acts involved will be in a car park somewhere off the M6, looking for the stage door. What isn’t nailed down is exactly which night the host changes. Chortle’s 23 September piece says Osman goes at the end of next week’s all-comic episodes and “then hands over to Michael Sheen for the remaining 90 episodes in the tenth series”. The handover therefore sits inside series ten rather than at a series boundary. The BBC has not published a specific first-Sheen-episode date that I can find. I’d treat any date floating around social media as a guess until the schedule page says otherwise.

Sheen’s appointment was announced by Banijay UK on 16 March 2026. The release said he would preside over the recording of 100 episodes, his debut as a quiz show host. Chortle now says 90 remain. Ninety or a hundred, it’s a lot of taping days, and it’s a lot of guests. Run my own arithmetic off the format: five episodes a week, four guests a week. That makes 100 episodes twenty weeks of shows and eighty guest bookings.

Sheen’s line when the news broke has been quoted everywhere since, and it’s still the best thing anybody has said about the job:

Quite literally very large shoes to fill but as a huge fan of the show I’m incredibly excited to be able to move into the House and at long last see my silhouette on a fondue set.

BBC executive Rob Unsworth, quoted by Chortle from the March announcement, said: “Richard Osman has established House of Games as one of our best-loved shows. His contribution to its success is impossible to overstate, and we couldn’t be more grateful for his work over the last nine years.” Tamara Gilder is joint MD of Remarkable Entertainment, which makes the show as part of Banijay UK Productions. She said in the same release: “We are thrilled to be handing Michael Sheen the keys to House of Games.”

A silhouette on a fondue set

Sheen’s fondue gag isn’t a gag. The winner’s prize is merchandise, not money. The Wikipedia entry describes it as “a normal everyday object of some description” carrying the show’s logo. That logo is a turquoise-blue background with a depiction of Osman’s hair, eyebrows and glasses. The overall winner gets a silver cup with the same depiction on it. Every comic I’ve ever heard mention the show brings up the tat, usually fondly, occasionally while trying to work out where they put it.

What the guest fee is, I’m not going to pretend to know. Every number I could find for daytime quiz appearance fees traces back to forums, Quora threads or paywalled tabloid reprints. None of those is a source. The prize is branded homeware and a trophy, and whatever the fee is, it sits separately from that.

Nor is there a route in for an act without representation. Guests are booked through agents and producers, and no source describes an open call. For an act without an agent, the realistic television targets right now are competition heats, so the New Comedian of the Year heats are probably a more useful read than this.

Five nights in a shrinking market

The reason a daytime quiz handover registers at all with working comics is the viewing figure. The last series drew around 1.6 million viewers per episode including catch-up and on-demand viewing over seven days, per Chortle. Nobody’s mistaking that for Apollo numbers, though it’s still five separate evenings of a comic’s face in front of an audience that buys theatre tickets, in a shrinking market. Channel 4 has folded comedy into drama with 340 jobs going. Live at the Apollo’s replacement is effectively a podcast on YouTube. There aren’t many employers left booking at that volume. Radio still books at scale, which is why the Radio 4 slate of 19 stand-ups and five pilots mattered so much in September.

The income backdrop is the Live Comedy Association’s sector survey, published on 4 February 2026. It found average wages dropped to £21,143 in 2025, down from £26,778 the year before. The average number of gigs fell from 3.2 per week to 2.5. The share of comedians who say they need additional income to supplement their careers rose from 62% to 74%. Dr Sharon Lockyer, summarising the findings, pointed to challenges “around precarity, wage stagnation, geographical inequities and inequities related to protected characteristics.”

A host change doesn’t touch any of that. The commission, the episode order and the four guests a week all carry on, with the production office ringing the same agents it rang last year. Whose eyebrows are on the mug is a separate question. Jupp, Lloyd, Porter and Smith-Bynoe get the last set with the old face on it. That will be worth something on eBay in about four years, assuming anyone remembers where they put theirs.

Sources

• The last comedians on Richard Osman’s quiz – Chortle
• Michael Sheen to host BBC Two and BBC iPlayer’s quiz – Banijay UK
• Richard Osman’s House of Games – Wikipedia
• BBC100: Richard Osman’s quiz (2017-) – Dirty Feed
• House Of Games start date confirmed – TV Zone
• UK Live Comedy Sector Survey – Live Comedy Association