Television
Endearingly rich
James Delingpole
Oh sod it. My original version of this column began with 11 unexpurgated F words, a) because I wanted to break the record for most swearwords in one Spectator column, and b) in order to recapture, for the many of you who won't have seen it, the experience of watching MTV's new true-life sitcom import The Osbournes (Sunday). Tragically, though, my editors wussed out — and I'm not saying they're wrong, maybe 11 solid fucks would have been beyond the pale, but I'm definitely saying that they're a bunch of pathetic girls for being so squeamish — so I'm afraid you have to have this limp-wristed version instead.
Anyway, The Osbournes is the fly-on-thewall documentary series about bat-chomping, heavy-metal has-been Ozzy Osbourne and his cutely dysfunctional family which has taken America by storm, earned Ozzy dinner with a star-struck President Bush, and stands to make him possibly more money (a rumoured $20 million for the next two series) than he made in his entire career with Black Sabbath.
1 say 'possibly' because the thing that struck me most about the first episode — apart from the incredible amount of swearing in it — is just how rich Ozzy and his family seem to be already. It opens with them moving into a new pad in Beverly Hills with walled, landscaped grounds, Tarzanesque swimming-pool, huge billiard room, state-of-the-art electronically controlled everything, a private security guard and so on, and I would guess that to afford that sort of thing you need to be reasonably well off.
Now normally with programmes about people as rich as this, the idea is to sneer at them and hate them and feel disgustingly jealous of them, rather as one does with all one's friends in law and banking. But the clever thing about the Osbournes is that they're so endearingly chaotic, eccentric, funny and down-to-earth that you can't help liking them. Identifying with them, even.
The key Ozzy-identification moment for me — and no doubt fathers all over the world — was the one where he sits impotently in front of the TV, slowly being driven insane with frustration by his inability to make his newfangled, uber-remote-control find anything but the weather channel. Cut to shot of the techno-geek who installed the system reassuring us that it's all so user-friendly that even an idiot can work it out straightaway. Cut to Ozzy screaming for his 16-year-old Jack to come and rescue him. Cut to Jack sorting it out in a matter of seconds.
As Ozzy's cartoon alter ego Homer Simpson would say, it's funny because it's true. Quite how true, though. I was never quite sure. I mean, I know the whole joy of the Osbournes is that it's completely unscripted and that it's about a real family leading real lives. But as Schrodinger's cat (or someone) once remarked, the act of observing an experiment changes the nature of the experiment. And so it must be, surely, with the Osbournes. I find it hard to believe that they behave quite like that when the cameras aren't around.
In the first episode, for example, we saw sister Kelly putting the kettle on the hob, forgetting that it was an electric kettle and therefore likely to burst into flames; we saw Ozzy excitedly unearthing a bayonet to go with the Lee Enfield he keeps under his bed (Ere Jack. Coom over 'ere. Oi've gorra a bay-o-net.' Pleasingly, he has kept his Brummie accent): we saw a pile of three boxes coming out of the removal lorry, one marked 'pots and pans' one marked 'linen' and one marked 'devil heads'. Now while I'm quite sure that decades of drugs, booze, high decibels and bats' blood have taken their toll on Ozzy's mental capabilities, I'm also sure that having a father like that is bound to have some sort of effect on his kids. At the same time one has to remember, though, that mother Sharon is an extremely canny businesswoman and that even for the first series they were pulling in $20,000 an episode. Of course I appreciate that for the lawyers and bankers among you this is but small change. But the rest of you I ask: wouldn't you too be able to persuade your family to behave just a little eccentrically for that kind of money?
Meanwhile, I didn't mean to, but the other night, to ward off my boredom while trying to blow up Ivo's inflatable Thunderbirds 2, I accidentally found myself watching the new Big Brother. I think everyone feels the same way: no one wants to watch it, but the second you do you're sucked in, deliciously transfixed and appalled. The gimmick in the latest series is that the house is nicer (it has a staircase and an outdoor spa pool) and the inmates are more terrifyingly desperate to perform. My sympathies are all with the middle-aged bloke, whose main aim appears to escape from his housemates' relentless relentlessness. He won't win, though, obviously.
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