EXCLUSIVE: Years of preparation, Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Homehas finally arrived on UK airwaves and will soon be streaming in the US on Peacock. With new sales likely to MIPCOM, the project, which has been in development for a long time, is on schedule.
Executive producers Rachael Barnes and Ben Wicks have exclusively partnered with Deadline in the making of a film about Ozzy, one of rock’s iconic artists, and Sharon, his wife and doyenne of television and the music world.
With Ozzy’s death in July, the filmmakers’ time spent with Ozzy and Sharon was even more poignant. What’s clear from the movie they ended up making is that Ozzy didn’t hold back. “It was like he was just hungry to talk,” Barnes says. “He’s a great storyteller, he tells incredible stories, but he was also very thoughtful. He talked about what it meant to come home. He talked about Britain. He talked about his memories of his childhood there. It wasn’t just nostalgia, but there was also a sense of him trying to understand his personal values at this stage of life and the place where he would feel most at home. He talked about his illness. He also talked about how he felt about death. ”
“It was falling apart,” adds Wicks, creative director of entertainment at Expectation, which produced the film alongside JOKS Productions. “Whether it was remembering Britain and what it was like, being incredibly honest about how hard it is, when you’re not feeling well, to motivate yourself to keep trying to perform. And he loved talking about Sharon and their relationship, and how much that meant to both of them.”
Melinda Varga, known to fans of The Osbournes as nanny to Jack and Kelly, and now executive assistant to Sharon, helped the project come to life. She facilitated a meeting between the producers and Sharon at Welders House, the clan’s UK home and the idea of Roost’s house was born.
“She said she wanted her and Ozzy to go home,” says Wicks. “We were all struck by the fact that what they were doing was incredibly relevant. They were coming to a point in their lives where they wanted to spend more time together as a couple, and not in Los Angeles, but in this beautiful wooded landscape that surrounds Welders.”
Fashionably late?
Connes
Sharon and Expectation met with Charlotte Moore, then the BBC’s head of content, and other bigwigs at the British public broadcaster, and Roost’s house was created as a ten-episode BBC series that would follow the return home.
So far, it’s simple, but it would almost be disappointing if everything went according to plan with a show about one of television’s most spontaneous families. As anyone stuck in the middle of a move or home renovation knows, things rarely go as planned. With some footage filmed in Los Angeles, but the move was delayed, and then Ozzy died, the show as originally envisioned was not possible. Given that it was originally about their return to the UK, which didn’t happen until May, circumstances led to it becoming a one-off film.
If the journey to this point has been fraught with change, the calendar changes have added to the story. Perhaps aware that arriving on time just isn’t very rock’n’roll, the BBC announced the broadcast date, then removed it from the schedule without explanation. Unsurprisingly, this sparked gossip, speculation and headlines. It was finally released at the beginning of October on BBC One with the title, the third since its commissioning, Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home.
Access & Excess
Given the success of The Osbournes on MTV worldwide and Ozzy’s superstar status, there will be strong international demand for the show. Responsibility for the sale lies with Banijay Rights, who is handling distribution and will present the show at the MIPCOM market in Cannes.
Wicks acknowledges a debt to the genre-defining original series. “With a lot of reality TV these days, access is conditional on not crossing certain editorial lines, and I have immense respect for the original series. We saw some good things, some bad things, but it was always incredibly entertaining. There’s this really impressive desire to be honest and authentic.”
This is the link to the new document, he explains. “That’s why they’re the best family in the world to allow cameras in their family home. They absolutely value family above anything or anything else. They’d rather be together as a family than hang out with famous friends. parents sometimes behave like naughty children. “
Authenticity is a word used by commissioners and executives, but in the case of the Osbournes, its use seems justified. That’s probably why viewers took them to heart.
“You know that this relationship, this closeness, is not just for the cameras,” Barnes adds. “That’s who they are. And so, you have this fantastic hyper-reality of Osbourne, but at the heart of it, you have people working on a family dynamic that is completely accessible.”
She continues, “One of the biggest things for them was understanding that Sharon and Ozzy wanted to come back here, and the kids don’t necessarily want that, because they have relationships with Sharon and Ozzy that they think are going to dilute with distance. For Sharon and Ozzy, as hard as it was, it was ‘this is our time now, we’re 70 years old, we’ve spent our whole lives working, right now we want to have this moment.’ together.’ Families around the world will relate to this. But then you have this kind of crazy, hyper-crazy Osbourne setting.
The film chronicles the preludes and aftermath of “Back To The Beginning”, Ozzy’s final mega-concert in which he headlined which also included the original Black Sabbath line-up and artists like Slayer and Guns ‘n’ Roses.
“What was powerful was seeing what led to this,” Wicks says. Someone who would stop at nothing to be able to perform. He really, really, absolutely wanted to do right by his fans, and he knew how much it would mean to them, and also how much it would mean to him.
