Unbreakable: My New Autobiography

by Sharon Osbourne

  And it’s my fault. For the last thirteen years I’ve lived a life of no balance; it’s been either great highs or deep lows. The truth is, if I was Ozzy I’d be pissed off with me too. In fact, I am pissed off at myself. You’d think that at this age I’d have it all sorted. I’m as clueless now as I was at sixteen. The only difference is that I’m aware of it now. And I’m trying. My catchwords now are ‘balance’ and ‘moderation’. I’ll let you know.

  16

  The Wild Card

  Making my X Factor return in typically OTT style!

  When I accepted Richard Curtis’s invitation in 2013 to do a sketch for Comic Relief, it wasn’t just altruism at work, nor even the opportunity to work with David Walliams. It was the script. The working title was ‘Simon Cowell’s Wedding’, and Simon himself had agreed to be involved. I hadn’t seen him since the last episode of America’s Got Talent, when I’d walked out. Then there had been the business of his biography, and my telling the world on live TV that he had a small dick. Almost a year had passed since we’d declared our truce over the phone on the day Pearl was born, but saying that you’re all fine with each other is one thing; you never know for sure until you see the whites of their eyes.

  And it wasn’t only Simon who would be there. If they all played ball, it would be a roll call of X Factor faces. And as I was whisked through the English countryside after landing at Heathrow, I had butterflies in my stomach. Whether it was nerves or excitement, I don’t know. More likely a combination of both.

  The conceit of the sketch is that Simon is standing at the altar with a mystery bride whose face is obscured by a veil. As this is his wedding, all his various friends and acquaintances are there in the congregation.

  When I arrived, Simon was filming some of his scenes, so we just nodded and smiled at each other across the pews. Britain’s Got Talent judges Amanda Holden and Alesha Dixon were there, dressed as bridesmaids, and the seated guests included previous contestants Stavros Flatley, Rylan Clark, Pudsey the dog and Sinitta, dressed only in palm fronds and weeping because she wasn’t the bride. Paul Potts led a choir made up of those gorgeous boys from JLS. It was quite a cast.

  Meanwhile, in a room at the back of the church, were Dermot O’Leary, Olly Murs, David Walliams and I, all waiting for our big moment.

  As Simon was about to take his vows, David ran up the aisle and tried to stop ‘my Simon’ from marrying the mystery bride, followed swiftly by Olly Murs, Dermot O’Leary and Louis Walsh all wearing white gowns too and declaring undying love for him. I nearly wet myself when I saw Louis wearing what was supposed to be a replica of Kate Middleton’s wedding dress but which, on him, looked as if it had been cobbled together from my nan’s curtains.

  Then came my entrance as, bursting into the church, also wearing a wedding dress, I push aside these other contenders for Simon’s hand.

  ‘Simon, I want to marry you.’

  ‘Really?’ He looked perplexed. ‘But I thought you hated me.’

  ‘I do. But I want to marry you so that I can ruin the rest of your life.’

  Needless to say, he turns me down, then lifts the veil of the bride to reveal that he is marrying himself.

  As a sketch it was absolutely hilarious, cleverly taking the piss out of all of us. And it was particularly brave of Simon, I thought. Although I was laughing along with the rest of them, it felt weird finding myself in a wedding dress, given the state of my marriage. By now the butterflies had totally gone, but the rumblings of nausea were still gurgling away in my stomach. And I realised that they had nothing to do with what was happening here today, and everything to do with the crap I was dealing with back home.

  No one present in the church had the faintest clue what I was going through at the time, not even Louis. As I always do in such situations, I was playing good old fun Sharon, being outrageously camp and cracking jokes like the best of them. Anything but reveal the depressing reality of my life at that time.

  It felt nice to have some uncomplicated fun without the burden of having to face up to my problems.

  Once the director had declared a wrap on filming, the lovely Sinitta came to find me. Thankfully minus the palm fronds by now.

  ‘Are you coming for dinner?’

  She and Simon are very old friends, and I knew that the invitation would include him.

  ‘I haven’t been asked,’ I smiled, glancing over her shoulder as he walked up behind her.

  ‘Of course you have,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘Come on, you’ve got to come.’

  We ended up at the Arts Club in Mayfair, just me, Louis, Simon and his on-off girlfriend Mezhgan Hussainy and Sinitta and her boyfriend. It was just like old times, and we had a great evening, with banter flying back and forth across the table. We talked a lot about things that had gone on in the past, dredging up old stories from the early X Factor days.

  It felt so lovely to be there, just laughing and joking and not having to worry about anyone else at the table. If Ozzy, by some miracle, had come out with us, I would have spent the duration being his social lubricant because, first, his damaged hearing means he can’t always get what people say in noisy restaurants, and second, they can’t always understand what he’s saying, so I have to act as go-between. It was great to sit there and think only of myself.

  Occasionally, one of them would ask me a question about Ozzy, and I would just bat it off with, ‘Oh, he’s being a wanker, the same as usual,’ but none of them knew that I really, really meant it.

  Eventually the coffee cups were cleared away and we all had to leave. Simon’s a very hard person to read at the best of times, but as far as I could tell, he had acted perfectly normally with me, both at the church and in the restaurant, so I left feeling relieved that clearly there was no issue between us. Normal service was resumed.

  A few weeks later, he called me. Did I want to be a judge on X Factor Australia? he asked. The Aussies knew me well because The Osbournes was very successful out there.

  My immediate thought was, Why the fuck not? A whole change of scene, good money, and, best of all, considering my disposition towards him at the time, I would be thousands of miles away from my husband, who by this point was having the motherfucker of all mid-life crises somewhere in the Buckinghamshire countryside. Send me the contract – where do I bloody sign?

  It was Jack who brought me down to earth. ‘Listen, Mum, you can’t do this. You will make yourself ill,’ he warned when I told him with great excitement about the offer.

  Admittedly, on paper the schedule did look slightly manic, particularly as I was planning to film three live shows of The Talk from Tuesday to Thursday, then pre-record one on the Thursday afternoon before hopping on a seventeen-hour flight to Australia for The X Factor at weekends then heading back to LA in time to film The Talk again on Tuesday. It was clearly insane, but I buried any misgivings and ploughed on with negotiations.

  I didn’t consult Ozzy because we weren’t speaking back then, just exchanging the occasional text about Sabbath business. Looking back, I’m sure that part of my wanting to do the Australian X Factor was yet again to prove to him that I was my own person and didn’t need his permission to go.

  Kelly was the next to join the queue of doom-mongers. ‘Mum, you’re fucking mad,’ she said. ‘You cannot physically do this, never mind mentally. You’re just not up to it. It’ll kill you.’

  Deep down, I knew she was right. In the AA programme they call it ‘doing a geographic’, when people move away because they think it will help solve their problems. But of course you can never escape what’s going on inside your own head. In the end, it was Jack who finally broke through to me.

  ‘If you do this, Mum, you’ll never get to see Pearl. And even if you do, you’ll be like a zombie. Is that what you want?’

  So, just as it got to the wire, I pulled out. Syco were pretty annoyed with me, and I don’t blame them, but I had finally accepted that running off to the other side of the world, away from my kids and grandkid
, was not going to solve my problems. The only way to have made it work would have been to move there for three months solid, which I couldn’t do as it would have meant giving up The Talk, which had become a lifeline for me.

  Then, a couple of days later, I got a call from Richard Holloway, executive producer of The X Factor UK and the man who had tried so valiantly to act as mediator between me and Dannii Minogue all those years ago. Would I be interested in returning as a judge for the tenth anniversary series, which started filming in three months’ time?

  ‘Is this a fucking wind-up?’

  ‘No, darling, absolutely not. It’s the real deal.’

  I still couldn’t quite believe it. During one of our weekly phone calls, Louis and I had discussed the possibility of me going back, but only in a nostalgic, wouldn’t-it-be-lovely kind of way. I don’t think either of us imagined it would actually happen.

  Yet here they were, at Simon’s instigation I presumed, offering me a chance to complete the circle, to go back for this milestone series and put things right. I had hated leaving like I did, so I relished the thought of going back to see all the old crew and picking up where I’d left off.

  When I told the kids, they still thought it was a bad idea because of the major travel involved, but LA to London was far more doable than the flight to Australia. And, from my point of view, as I told them, the opportunity to make amends and distract myself from the chaotic state of my marriage was too good to miss. So I said yes, yes, YES!

  I hadn’t breathed a word about it to Ozzy, who was now away on tour and still attempting to stay sober. I wasn’t hiding anything from him, as we weren’t living together when the negotiations started, and I didn’t think it was any of his fucking business at that time.

  The first two days of filming were 4 and 5 June in Glasgow, and I jetted in from LA the night before. I was really looking forward to it, but also felt slightly unnerved by being the new girl on an already established judging panel. Would I fit in?

  Obviously, I knew I was replacing former judge Tulisa Contostavlos, and that Louis had really enjoyed working with her, but other than that I didn’t really know much about her. However, just before I arrived in Glasgow, a story had broken about her allegedly setting up a drug deal for an undercover reporter, and I felt nothing but sympathy for the poor girl. She’s young, she’s vulnerable and she doesn’t seem to have good people around her. Or she does, and she’s not listening to their advice. But either way, everything is celebrity-driven now and you have to know how to handle that, but how can you when you’re still in your early twenties? That could so easily have been Kelly when she was hanging out with the wrong crowd in London, so even though I had never met Tulisa, my heart went out to her.

  My advice to her would be to stay away from alcohol for a while and perhaps go through some therapy to deal with any issues, then keep a very low profile until it all blows over. I would say, use that time to rethink your life and where you want to be for the next few years, because she has got a lot going for her. She just needs to take stock and look at who she’s hanging around with, what their influence is on her. She’s only young; she can come back from it.

  Myself and the other judges were all staying at the Grosvenor Hilton in the city and, of course, quite a crowd of fans and assorted media had gathered outside the entrance. As I stepped out of the car, a number of autograph books were pushed in my direction and I started signing them as the fans and journalists shouted questions at me. It was utter chaos.

  ‘Sharon! How does it feel to be back on X Factor?’

  ‘I love it.’

  ‘Sharon, what do you think of Glasgow?’

  ‘I love it.’

  ‘Sharon, what do you think of Tulisa…’

  I couldn’t hear the rest of the sentence above the mayhem, so just stuck with the same shtick.

  ‘I love it.’

  As soon as the words left my mouth, I realised that answering a question you can’t hear is a very stupid thing to do. I should have known that, given my years of experience of having remarks thrown at me on red carpets around the world. But it was too late.

  It turned out that they’d asked me what I thought of Tulisa being in trouble. Shit. And, of course, the next day they ran a story about her with my quote tagged on the end as if I was gloating about a young girl having a bad time, which I would never do. So that pissed me off no end. What a great start.

  Once inside the hotel, I established that all the other judges had arrived and insisted we all meet in the bar for ‘one drink’, just to hang out a bit before we started filming the very next morning. Well, one drink led to another. Then another. There was no food, not even a slice of cake, so the booze went straight to our heads. We finally got to bed at 4 a.m., and had to be up three and a half hours later!

  Louis and I are old friends, and I know Nicole Scherzinger from way back too. I first met her in LA, when she was still in the Pussycat Dolls, and thought she was just the most magnificent young woman. She is one of those women you look at and go, wow. But not only does she have a face and figure that are jaw-dropping, she is beautiful on the inside too and such a grafter. My God, she has worked her butt off for every last thing she has in life and she never takes her success for granted. I adore her.

  When I did what turned out to be my last X Factor in 2007, she had come out to Los Angeles to help me choose my finalists at the judges’ house, and I see her around and about occasionally over there too. We have a great relationship, and it’s only got better since working on this year’s series together.

  The only judge I didn’t know was Gary Barlow, though I respected him enormously as an artist. There wasn’t a Take That tour I hadn’t seen, so I hoped that when we finally met we would gel – and we did.

  We all clicked immediately, no doubt assisted by the alcohol we consumed that first night, but from then on we just hit a rhythm and it worked. The four of us complement each other well – two artists and two managers looking at things from a different perspective – and we’re careful to give each other the space and time to say our piece without talking across each other. And as many of the camera and sound guys were the same ones who had done the 2007 series, it was like putting on a comfy pair of old slippers. It was friendly but, best of all, it was fun.

  ‘I was nice and professional before you joined,’ Gary told me after a few days. ‘Now you’ve turned me into a naughty boy.’

  It was true. The four of us were back in the hotel bar in Glasgow, all wearing our dressing gowns, a rule I had insisted upon for comfort, and one that stuck for the duration of filming the audition stages.

  Gary’s eyes had popped out of his head when I first suggested it, but soon he didn’t give a shit. We must have looked a right sight to other guests staying in the hotels on our itinerary across the country, but at the end of each day’s filming, we all felt very wired and the surge of adrenalin wasn’t something we could just switch off. We needed to unwind, to sit and just be silly for a bit, and the bar was the best place to do that. Also, it felt liberating for us to have conversations together that weren’t being bloody filmed.

  I corrupted Gary during filming, too. After a few polite responses to contestants on the first day on set, it didn’t take me long to hit my stride on the insults, particularly when it was one of those ear-wiltingly bad singers who has auditioned before and just wants to be on TV for a painful few seconds. We could all spot them a mile off, but unlike the others, I couldn’t be arsed to be polite about it.

  ‘Fuck off, you’re wasting our time,’ I told one man who looked like he’d come straight from the pub and didn’t even know the proper words to the song he was supposedly trying to impress us with.

  I could see that Gary was rather unsettled by my bluntness, but after a succession of piss-poor acts he finally snapped and started talking my language.

  ‘Nah, fuck off, you’re rubbish.’

  Bad auditions like these were fun in small doses, but if you got a run of them
it could be very wearing. Then, every so often, an act would wander in that reminded me why I loved doing the show.

  In 2007, when I last did the show, a fourteen-year-old girl called Stephanie Woods auditioned and got through to my judges’ house stage in Hollywood, the one where Nicole was helping me. But we didn’t put her through to the live finals because she was just so young, and I felt it was too soon for that kind of pressure. She was a genuinely nice girl, but she wasn’t as street-smart as the others and I thought, I can’t do this to you. It’s too much. Afterwards, I wrote her a note telling her that she was a star and shouldn’t give up on her dream.

  Fast-forward six years, and she turned up with my note in her hand. It was such an incredible moment for me, really humbling. She’s twenty now, and working in a normal job, not singing, but she auditioned again and this time got through to the next stage, so we’ll see what happens.

  The first major difference I noticed between the first four series of The X Factor and the current one is how the absence of Simon made it much harder work. When he was on board, he would flatly refuse to start filming before noon, so it meant the rest of us got a lie-in too. Invariably he would turn up a couple of hours late anyway, so it meant we wouldn’t get going until 2 p.m. or 3 p.m., but I didn’t care because me and Louis would sit around chatting with the production crew, gossiping about what was in the papers and catching up on everyone’s lives. It was a job, yes, but it also felt like a little family. Prior to the arrival of Dannii Minogue, I had always actively looked forward to going. It had never felt like work.

  This time, however, it did. The judges all got along swimmingly, so that wasn’t the issue. It was the interminably long hours, and that there was seemingly no escape from the cameras. The only place we weren’t filmed was the toilet, and even then, within two minutes someone would be banging on the door saying I was needed on set. It felt a bit like being on Big Brother.