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known him for forty-plus years.
    I didn’t really know much about what was going on in Kelly’s life. And even if I had, it’s doubtful I could have done anything anyway. If I say, ‘Don’t cross that road, Kel,’ she’ll not only cross it but she’ll stand in the middle and wave her arms. In other words, she’s a pea from the maternal pod, both fearless and bloody-minded. She’ll fix me with those gorgeous green eyes and tell me exactly what she thinks of my latest life choice. But she’s also disarmingly tactile and affectionate, so the next day we’ll hug and everything will be fine again.
    In the nature of the job, all mothers worry about their children, usually unnecessarily, but when I saw pictures of Kelly in the press looking wrecked, I was really worried. But I was three thousand miles away – what could I do?
     
    It didn’t help that I was responsible for her ‘fame’. From the moment The Osbournes first aired she’d been considered public property, and the reference to ‘Ozzy Osbourne’s two fat kids’ took its toll. I took none of this into consideration when I made the decision to put my kids into the public domain. The truth is, I was throwing them into a lions’ den.
    The last episode of The Osbournes aired in 2005. Although they had been repeated and repeated, requests regularly came in from different networks to get the Osbournes back together again. No way! What made the show great was that the children were teenagers and we all lived under the same roof. It was totally genuine – nothing was invented, nothing was done for camera. Now we had all moved on, and had no intention of going there ever again, and we didn’t.
    Osbournes Reloaded was an entirely different concept. This wasn’t a reality show, it was basically a variety show. We did comedy sketches. We did silly games. Ozzy sang, Kelly sang. It was scripted and rehearsed and filmed over a long period of time (although Ozzy’s adherence to the script was minimal). We did filmed segments going around America meeting other families also called Osbourne. Aimee was asked whether she wanted to be involved and, just as before, on the original The Osbournes , she said no.
    One reason I decided to go ahead was that I recognised it as an opportunity for us to be together. Increasingly we were off doing our own thing. Jack was climbing mountains in obscure corners of the world, Kelly was working in the UK, Ozzy was touring in the Far East, while I was doing a daily talk show in California. This way, we’d be working together for the first time in years, and we’d be getting paid. Finally it was a way of bringing Kelly back home. It was a no-brainer. The show was like a new animal for us, a different experience. It was filmed in front of a live studio audience of 600 people. There were to be six shows, and the whole project would take three months.
    Of course, being the Osbournes, this wasn’t ordinary variety. It wasn’t polite, like Donny & Marie or Ant and Dec. The scripts were good, everything was really funny, but it was edgy. The show’s researchers scoured the internet for wacky stories. They found a guy who was a serial dater, who claimed to have dated ten women and had sex with each of them on the first night. So they found the girls, who were let in on the joke. Not so the guy – he had just been invited to appear on a new games show. We lined the girls up behind a screen, put him in front of it and when these women he’d slept with for one night only were revealed, he was asked to name them. To give him his credit, he did recognise a few.
    Then there were a brother and sister who’d been brought up by their grandmother, who they’d said was always embarrassing them. They were invited to the show and at one point they watched as a naked woman danced to ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ by Mötley Crüe. She was behind a backlit screen so you could only see the silhouette. They had no idea who it was, of course. Then when the