EXCLUSIVE: Years in the making, Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home, has finally hit UK airwaves and will soon play in the U.S. on Peacock. With more sales likely at MIPCOM, the long-gestating project is hitting schedules.
Exec Producers Rachael Barnes and Ben Wicks exclusively took Deadline inside the making of film about Ozzy, one of rock’s iconic performers, and Sharon, his wife and doyenne of TV and the music biz.
With Ozzy’s death in July, the filmmakers’ time with Ozzy and Sharon had extra poignancy. What is clear from the film they ended up making is that Ozzy was not holding back. “It felt as though he was just hungry to talk,” says Barnes. “He’s a great raconteur, he tells amazing stories, but he was also very reflective. He would talk about what coming home meant. He would talk about Britain. He would talk about his memories of growing up there. It was not just nostalgia, but there was a sense of him trying to understand his personal values at this stage of life and where he would feel most at home. He would talk about his illness. He would talk about how he felt about death as well.”
“It was tumbling out,” adds Wicks, Creative Director, Entertainment, at Expectation, which produced the film alongside JOKS Productions. “Whether it was remembering Britain and what it was like, to being incredibly honest about how hard it is, when you’re not feeling your best, to motivate yourself to keep trying to perform. And he loved talking about Sharon and their relationship, and how so how much that meant to the both of them.”
Melinda Varga, known to fans of The Osbournes as nanny to Jack and Kelly, and now Sharon’s executive assistant, 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 for Home to Roost was born.
“She said that she wanted her and Ozzy to return home,” explains Wicks. “It struck all of us that what they’re doing was incredibly relatable. They were getting to a stage in their lives where they wanted to spend more time together as a couple, and not in LA, but in this beautiful wooded landscape that surrounds Welders.”
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Sharon and Expectation met with then BBC content boss Charlotte Moore and other bigwigs at the British public broadcaster, and Home to Roost was set up as a ten-part BBC series that would follow the return home.
So far, so simple, but it would almost be disappointing if everything went to plan with a show about one of TV most spontaneous families. As people stuck in the middle of a house move or a home renovation will know, things rarely run to schedule. With some footage shot in LA, but the move delayed, and then Ozzy passing away, the show as originally envisaged was not possible. Given that it was originally about their return to the UK, which only occurred in May, circumstances led to it becoming a single film.
If the journey to this point was beset by change, scheduling changes added to the story. Possibly aware that turning up on time just isn’t very rock‘n’roll, the BBC announced the airdate, and then pulled it from the schedule without explanation. Unsurprisingly, that fired up gossip, speculation and headlines. It ultimately went out in early October on BBC One with the title, its third since commission, Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home.
Access & Excess
Given the success of The Osbournes on MTV around the world, and Ozzy’s superstar status, there will be strong international demand for the show. Responsibility for selling it falls to Banijay Rights, which is across distribution and will have the show at the MIPCOM market in Cannes.
Wicks acknowledges a debt to the original genre-defining show. “With a lot of reality shows nowadays the access is conditional on certain editorial lines not being crossed, and I have got huge respect for the original series. You saw good stuff, bad stuff, but it was always incredibly entertaining. There is this really impressive desire to be honest and authentic.”
That’s the through-line to the new doc, he explains. “It’s why they’re the best family on Earth to allow cameras into their family home. They absolutely elevate the importance of family above all or anything else. They would rather be together as a family than hang out with celebrity friends. And for whatever reason, they are willing to share that with the world. We found it to be exactly the same and they were obviously in a really different stage in their lives, where the kids start parenting the parents, and the parents sometimes behave like naughty children.”
Authenticity is a word bandied around by commissioners and execs, but in the case of the Osbournes its use feels justified. That’s likely why viewers took them to their hearts.
“You know that that relationship, that closeness, is not for the cameras,” adds Barnes. “That is who they are. And so, you’ve got this fantastic Osbourne hyper-reality, but at the core of it, you’ve got people who are working out family dynamics that are totally relatable.”
She continues: “One of the big things for them was working out the fact that that Sharon and Ozzy wanted to come back here, and the kids are not necessarily wanting that, because they’ve got relationships with Sharon and Ozzy that they think are going to become diluted by the distance. For Sharon and Ozzy, as difficult as that is, it was all about ‘this is our time now, we’re in our 70s, we spent our whole lives working, right now, we want to have this time together.’ Families everywhere will relate to that. But then you’ve got this sort of massive mad, hyper, Osbourne setting.”
The film chronicles the lead up to, and aftermath of, ‘Back To The Beginning’, Ozzy’s final mega-concert in which he topped a bill that also included the original Black Sabbath line-up and the likes of Slayer and Guns ‘n’ Roses.
“What was powerful was seeing what led up to that,” 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.”
