God Bless Ozzy Osbourne (4/10)

December 20th, 2011

A rum old bird is Mr. Celebrity. Take Ozzy Osbourne: Wife-beater; substance-abuser; alcoholic; animal-killer – adored by millions. Why is that? Partly, I reckon, because of MTV’s The Osbournes, which showed the drunken old fool flapping about, unable to turn the telly over. It was rib-tickling stuff, the second funniest rock documentary television series ever*, and how we laughed. God Bless Ozzy Osbourne, financed in part by Ozzy’s son Jack, seeks to right a few wrongs and tell us what a great guy Ozzy really is. The movie, like Ozzy’s liver, is not so great.

You wonder how it is that Ozzy’s still breathing, what with the gargantuan amounts of abuse he’s put his body through in the past forty years. He wonders it too. At time of filming he’s been clean for five years, after at least fifty failed attempts. When Jack got straight, Ozzy finally did too. Like son, like father. He can’t remember parts of his life at all, so drunk or stoned as he was at the time. He watches one of his eighties music videos blankly as if seeing it for the first time. With wife and former intended murder victim Sharon faithfully by his side, Osbourne tells us what he can remember of his life so far.

You’ll know most of the details, of course, because of his celebrity. There’s been a VH1 special recounting his story, and the MTV show touched on some of his exploits too. The press have trundled out his drinking stories, his dove-munching stories and his Alamo-pissing stories too, so when Osbourne discusses them we’re not getting anything new. What we’re getting, though, is a very long set up that brings us to today, and how he has finally turned over a new leaf.

He was drunk as a skunk for the majority of The Osbournes, which explains his shakes and his slurred speech. The Osbourne clan rallied around him, as they always did, and cried ‘foul’. Naughty MTV, they said, showing poor Dad in such a way. They’re a remarkable family, really. Jack, Kellie and Aimee (the latter refused to appear on MTV but is interviewed here) have never expressed anything but total respect and love for their father, despite him hardly ever being there and being shit-faced when he was. ‘You never wanted for anything since the day you were born’, he told them repeatedly. ‘Oh yeah? What about wanting a father?’

Osbourne shows us his roots, going back to the little Birmingham suburb where he was raised. Fellow Black Sabbath members are interviewed, all telling us how wacky young John Osbourne was as a rock star, and even Paul McCartney pops up to add some grudging admiration for the doom-merchants’ music. For the majority of the time, though, it’s all about Ozzy and his memories, which might well be unreliable.

Ozzy’s two kids from his first marriage are shown, as are three sisters. The kids, obviously, are all grown up now (Ozzy’s actually a granddad) and paint a similar picture of his lack of parental abilities. Later, Randy Rhoads’ death is discussed, with Ozzy asking an interesting question: ‘Why do people ask me about the craziest prank I’ve ever done’, he ponders, ‘why don’t they ask me how I felt about the death of Randy Rhoads?’ Osbourne’s media-attracting japes had taken on a life of their own. Sharon tells us how Ozzy beat her up, even once attempting to kill her. Yet here she is, thirty years wed to the wild man of rock. You’ve got to hand it to her.

Osbourne the man and Osbourne the media figure aren’t, I’m afraid, my cup of tea. As such I didn’t really enjoy God Bless Ozzy Osbourne that much at all. If you like him, and enjoy hearing his tales told one more time, then you’ll want to see this. I’m afraid I just got rather annoyed at it.

PS: The documentary mentions that Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ album reached number one in 1970 in Britain, and lists the rest of the chart. ‘Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out’, ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’, ‘Cosmo’s Factory’ and ‘Led Zeppelin 2’ rounded out the list. It’ll be interesting to see if any of the current top 5 albums in the UK will be similarly remembered by just their titles in forty years time.