JAN MOIR: The Osbournes invented actuality TV. Now, of their grief, they’re having to dwell with the results

Yes, it is very sad that Ozzy Osbourne died earlier this year. The marvellous rocker was 76 years old and no stranger to health problems.

Given his wild early life, soaked in drink, drugs and corresponding addiction problems, some might say it’s amazing he lasted so long.

Others, like me, are at an age where we now think, gosh, 76 is so young. He could have had another ten good years. At least.

But the vicissitudes of a misspent youth have a way of catching up with you in the end. Your past informs your future. There is no escape from yourself.

Grieving wife Sharon went on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored show to talk about Ozzy’s death and reveal the last words he spoke to her. Is nothing sacred any more, I thought, as she fought back the tears and chatted on.

It seemed a remarkable invasion of her own privacy to do such a thing. For surely the last communication between a husband and a wife, the final private exchanges of a dying spouse to the woman he had been married to for 43 years should have remained exactly that – private.

Instead, Sharon told the world that Ozzy had woken her up by going up and down to the bathroom all night and at around 4.30am had said: ‘Kiss me. Hug me tight.’ Then he went to his home gym, exercised on his cross trainer for 20 minutes before having a heart attack and dying on the spot.

He is now buried under an apple tree at the family home in Buckinghamshire and had expressed a desire for the family to make cider from the fruit and have a drink on him.

For a man who once bit the head off a bat and spent his last years biting into his beloved burritos, Ozzy was funny to the last.

Sharon told Piers she is contemplating publishing his unseen diaries and sketches because nevermind negotiating the grief, Ozzy was a one-man goldmine and dead or alive, the business of show and burnishing of legacy must go on.

Sharon was a loving wife but she was also her husband’s manager and as shrewd and smart as they come. Repackaged greatest hits collections cannot be far off, either.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this onscreen lack of filter. For the Osbournes are reality television royalty.

They were the first celebrities to allow themselves to be filmed at home, fly on the Hollywood-wall style.

The resulting MTV show The Osbournes began in 2002 and featured the home life of Sharon, Ozzy and children Jack and Kelly, although eldest daughter Aimee did not participate.

It was a smash hit, this weirdo, oddball family with their incontinent pets who squabbled with their neighbours and fought with each other.

It had a huge cultural impact and spawned – I think that is the correct word – many, many imitators. Without Sharon and Ozzy there would be no Paris Hilton reality show, no Keeping Up With The Kardashians, no Katie Price, no Furys, no Totally Scott Lee and no The Baldwins and wouldn’t that have been quite wonderful?

Even Jacob Rees-Mogg attempted to stage his own Osbournes-style reality show but it didn’t really work.

Jacob is no Ozzy and his wife Helena Anne Beatrix Wentworth Fitzwilliam aka Lady Rees-Mogg is no Sharon – what with being rather nice and well-mannered and not given to throwing giant hams over the wall because the neighbours won’t stop playing tennis, don’t ask.

The show made stars of all the participating Osbournes.

Despite a notable lack of any inherited showbiz talent, gumption or skills Kelly became a pop star, and Jack became a presenter and reality show contestant, while Sharon became a talk show host and a judge on The X Factor and America’s Got Talent.

Ozzy just went from strength to strength.

Mother and daughter have both been using weight-loss drugs and Kelly is upset over online remarks about her appearance.

‘To the people who keep thinking they’re being funny and mean by writing comments like “Are you ill,” or “Get off Ozempic, you don’t look right”. My dad just died, and I’m doing the best that I can, and the only thing I have to live for right now is my family,’ she said in a since-deleted clip.

Poor Kelly. I feel for her at this dark moment. However, if you invite the public into your life and then profit handsomely from that association and their interest in you, you can’t just turn off their attentions when it suits.

Kelly doesn’t deserve the snide anonymous online comments underneath her photographs – who does? – but one wonders if reality stars bring it upon themselves to a certain degree.

Certainly, big sister Aimee never got the star treatment that came with MTV success, but she never experienced the dark side either.

Perhaps Sharon understands this all too well, a bold woman who is no stranger to extremes and has lived her life to the max.

She buried her beloved husband less than six months ago and, before the year is over, she is already out there and she is on it.

The book, the drawings, the love, the legacy, here it all comes, whooshing down the airwaves.

Yet despite everything, her fretful words of loss and regret were moving, the sentiment instantly familiar to anyone who has been bereaved.

‘If only I’d have told him I loved him more. If only I’d have held him tighter,’ she told the show’s millions of You Tube subscribers. It is the same sad story, whether you are famous or not.

And that is the reality of it.

Starmer Lords it over us with false promises

One of Sir Keir Starmer’s many false election promises was that he would replace ‘the House of Lords with a new democratically elected second chamber’.

Another complete fib.

Not only has the HOL not been replaced or abolished, this week the embattled PM shovelled another 25 Labour peers in there.

As a politician he is that terrible, sanctimonious mix of faux outrage and fake morality masquerading as principles.

As a man, he’s even worse.

Surely he can’t struggle on for much longer? Fingers crossed.

Two teenagers are publicly speaking up against Australia’s new under-16’s social media ban, challenging the policy in the country’s highest court. They argue that the law removes their right to ‘free communication’ – and that instead of restricting access for children, the Australian government should be devoting their resources to tackling harmful online content.

Haven’t they got a very good point? Social media firms have a duty to all of us to start mucking out their stables. They can’t go on pumping out easily accessible porn and violence and God knows what else, then throwing their hands up and saying, ‘It’s not our fault’. They must be made responsible, in some ways.

Meanwhile, children are so technically savvy that many of them have already managed to outsmart the ban. But at least the Australian government is addressing the problem. Many other countries, including ours, are watching developments closely.

Award for hypocrisy goes to … 

What a truly genius idea from the Royals to give Bridgerton actress Adjoa Andoh an MBE. Remember how she complained that the Buckingham Palace balcony during King Charles’s Coronation was ‘terribly white’?

I always hoped that Farrow & Ball would bring out a paint colour called Terribly White in her honour but so far, no go.

Andoh’s remarks came during live coverage on ITV, when she airily told viewers, ‘We have gone from the rich diversity of the [Westminster] Abbey to a terribly white balcony. I am very struck by that.

‘I am also looking at those younger generations and thinking: ‘What are the nuances that they will inhabit when they grow?’

What nuances indeed? Despite the widespread annoyance caused by her achingly wokeist observation, the actress seemed delighted to accept her MBE from Prince William, who was one of the bods standing on the balcony when she made the comment. Watch her skip up that red carpet!

All of a sudden Adjoa doesn’t mind the white folks after all. So she happily accepted her gong from the Prince of Wales, surely given for services to hypocrisy.

Don’t write off the £11 billion Covid furlough fraudsters

A government watchdog has found that COVID-19 fraud and error has cost the taxpayer nearly £11 billion – but do you know what? They are not bovvered.

It’s just like a tax scam, they say. It’s not even worth trying to get the money back, they shrug. It is unrecoverable, so why bother, they sigh.

Can’t they try? Yes £1.8 billion has been recovered but the rest of it – scattered to the four winds on furlough payments, bounce-back loans, Eat Out to Help Out schemes and dodgy PPE suppliers – has gone.

In the heat of the pandemic panic, people who had never run a business nor a corner shop were making it up as they went along.

These schemes were leaky, there was weak accountability, bad quality data, poor contracting and inbuilt fraud risks that no one identified. Why? Because they were all so naive. The schemes were open to abuse, opportunism and profiteering by hucksters – and that is exactly what happened.

We might not get the money back but can’t there be more prosecutions or more rulings like that against a firm linked to Michelle Mone, which was ordered to repay £122 million for breaching a PPE contract? Or name and shame at the very least?

I suspect those civil servants and politicians who don’t care about recouping this debt are the same ones who are furious about the Royal Family’s housing and tax arrangements and would happily spend the next century trying to chisel every penny they can from the King & Co.

But £11 billion on this nonsense? Apparently, it is no big deal.