Fierce (18 page)

All the MTV executives were waiting to meet us on the patio entrance overlooking the sea and me, Mum, Dad, Aimee and Jack went over and introduced ourselves. They explained to us a concept they had for a TV show in which they’d film us all at home. It would be a sort of extended
Cribs
.

Mum turned to us and said, ‘It’s up to you, would you like to do it?’

Straight away Jack and I said, ‘Yes.’

I thought to myself, this is going to be so cool, so fucking amazing. My friends and I watched MTV all the time and now my family were going to be on it!

I understood it to be a show primarily about my dad because he’s bloody entertaining. We were simply giving our permission to let them film us in the background. Of course I wanted to take part behind the scenes, and I was cool if I appeared on screen now and again. I thought I would be the daughter no one would remember.

We all left the meeting really excited but Aimee had decided that she didn’t want to appear front of camera. She’s remained out of the spotlight ever since. It was October 2001 and we were just about to move into our new house on Doheny Road so the MTV film crew started filming on the day we moved in. Mum and Dad had bought the house from the King of Bongo who’d had to move back to Africa ‘very quickly’. Mum being mum (she’s not happy unless she’s moving house or making her mark on a house) was in the process of gutting the place. She was ripping out pillars and making rooms bigger and knocking down walls. The builders were still finishing the work when we were moving in and it was chaos.

As you walked through the main door (she had all the original door handles taken off and replaced in the style of a cross), the staircase to the bedrooms sat in the middle of the oval entrance. In the far left-hand corner of the hallway were stable barn-style doors that led to the kitchen and small lounge. In one sense, the house appeared quite gothic with skulls and crosses hanging up. But then my mum would shove in a Laura Ashley-style sofa covered in flowers with matching lampshades and curtains. My mum’s desk with her computer was in the kitchen too so that room was the centre of the house. The doors from the kitchen led to the garden, so the dogs would be in and out.
My dad would be walking about moaning, ‘Fuck me, I’m living in Doctor Dolittle’s house. There’s piss and shit everywhere.’

At first, I was really conscious of the cameras. I mean, who wouldn’t be? I was convinced I wouldn’t appear a lot so I wanted to make sure that when I did, I looked OK. I definitely made sure I put make-up on.

On that first day, my mum was on the driveway, hidden behind the heavy electronic wooden gates surrounded by hundreds of cardboard boxes with labels on saying: ‘Kelly’, ‘Jack’, ‘lounge’, ‘kitchen’, etc.’, written in thick pen. She was busy directing the removal men. I was in my bedroom with our nanny Melinda unpacking all my clothes in the walk-in wardrobe with pink-and-white tiles and telling the joiners that the fewer shelves they gave me, the less crap I could put on them.

Jack was busy in his bedroom unpacking his shit in his typical boy’s bedroom, which was all wooden and black.

My father was walking around the hallway at the bottom of the massive staircase with a fuck-off rifle bellowing, ‘Sharon! Where shall I put this? Shall I put it under our bed?’ The camera crew, who had put twenty-four fixed cameras around our house and set up a control room, were there capturing it all. It had been agreed that there would be no cameras in the bathrooms or toilets. A cameraman and sound guy would also be wandering around. Within the first hour of them being there, my dad decided he wanted to jump into the empty swimming pool we were having built and pretend to do breast-stroke.

The MTV guys were pissing themselves laughing at us all, but we were all kind of looking at them and then at each other thinking, ‘Isn’t this going to be a bit boring for the viewers?’ There was no agenda. There wasn’t some guy saying, ‘Let’s set this shit up, let’s set that shit up.’ They never told us what to do, they never scripted anything. So we were just getting on with our lives.

Jack was still at school, so Melinda dropped him off every morning. I should have been at Westmark too (the specialist school for kids with dyslexia) but I’d quit. It was a great school, but my mind was elsewhere. I just wasn’t interested. There had been the initial talk about doing
The Osbournes
and my mind was on that and I didn’t think I needed to finish my education.

Don’t get me wrong. Walking out of school without completing my education wasn’t the wisest thing I’ve ever done. I’m the first to admit that back then I wasn’t clever or, rather, I wasn’t academic. I worried every single day about what I was going to do with my life because I hated school so much and knew I wasn’t doing well. Like everyone’s parents, my mum and dad expected me to make my own money.

I
t
was the middle of the morning when I marched through the swinging kitchen doors and told my mum I wasn’t ever going back to school. She wasn’t particularly pleased. She was stood in the kitchen pretending to do something domesticated. My mother can’t cook. She simply can’t cook. When my father was drinking, he used to hide his bottles of booze in the oven because he knew she wouldn’t find them in there because she never opened the bloody oven door.

She said, ‘If you’re going to leave school, Kelly, you’re going to have to be home-schooled.’

She brought in a tutor, but that lasted all of two weeks. Within three days I’d talked the tutor into doing all my work for me.

I thought I might like to work in the fashion industry or become a make-up artist. I’d grown up in a musical family, so working behind the scenes in the music world was also something I was considering. I had always been interested in how bands developed their image and brand.

My mum was adamant that I get a job if I was going to quit school and I was up for it. I started working in the office of a music management company, just off Robertson. I was literally starting at the bottom as the office girl, otherwise known as the coffee slut! I guess what my mum was trying to teach me was that just because you quit school you can’t sit at home all day. I still had to get up and go to the office for 10 a.m. I’d make coffee, answer the phones, do the post and send faxes. I really enjoyed it. I got paid a hundred dollars a week. I learned so much and I wasn’t at home sitting on my sorry arse. It also made me realise that sitting in a classroom just wasn’t how I was going to learn. That first job taught me what it’s like to be in an office environment. I had to be responsible and it taught me how to be disciplined. The only person who was going to get me to work in the morning was me.

W
HEN
we started filming
The Osbournes
, I still worked at the music management company and for five months we just got on with our lives in front of the MTV crew. The novelty of wanting to look good for the cameras soon wore off. I stopped planning what I
was going to wear the night before and even stopped bothering to put make-up on.

I was used to having a house full of people because it’d had been like that all my life. Our nanny Melinda was with us all the time, Uncle Tony had helped bring us up, there would be people coming to see my mum about Ozzfest and our housekeeper would always be about. Jack would have his friends hanging out in the house and I’d have mine over so it was constantly busy. Adding a camera crew to the mix really wasn’t a big deal.

In 2002, the whole concept of ‘reality TV’ was in its infancy. There had never been anything like
The Osbournes
on television ever ever. It’s since been described as the first reality-based comedy. In the UK there had been
Big Brother
, which started in 2000, the same year as the US version. But sticking a whole bunch of strangers into a house and watching them 24/7 was very different to what our show was about. For a start, my dad was already famous and the cameras were invited into our own home. But I think the biggest difference and the one that set us apart then – and still does today – is we were NEVER told what to do. We were simply living our lives. That’s what made the show so unique. But because we were just getting on with what we’d always done as a family, it meant we didn’t have any concept of how big it could get or how it would change our lives.

At the beginning, I was aware of the cameras, of course. But it really didn’t take long before I got used to them. That’s why I didn’t think it would change my life like it did. I’d be swinging in the Perspex chair hanging from the ceiling of my bedroom and I’d suddenly do
a loud fart and think nothing of it – even though a fucking sound mike would be just millimetres away from my arse cheeks! That chair really made my farts echo.

Everything about my bedroom was fucking pink! I had pink walls and pink sofas, which were all different shapes – a bit like a jigsaw – and when you pieced them together they made one big sofa. I had white shutters at the window and matching white furniture. The cameras became part of the furniture too.

I suppose I was just going through the normal teenage stuff. Like one day, I decided to get a tattoo and talk about it on camera, but I still thought I would be able to keep it a secret from my mother. I didn’t imagine they would show it on TV. I had also planned to keep it a secret from my father, but Bigmouth Jack told him.

I was sitting next to Dad on the flowery sofa in the kitchen while Jack sat in the chair. We were all watching the Discovery Channel (my dad fucking loves it, and the History Channel, they’re his favourites) on the flat screen attached to the wall when Jack managed to purposely let slip that I’d had a tattoo.

My dad jumped up and said, ‘What’s this all about then Kelly? Have you had a fucking tattoo? Have you? You’ve got to be careful, man!? I had one that went septic on my arm.’

So, in the end, I was forced to show him the tiny red heart I’d had tattooed on my hip bone. But only on condition he didn’t tell Mum. Straight away he was on the phone to Mum in the hairdresser’s telling her as she had her hair washed at the sink.

I could hear him on the phone saying, ‘It’s actually not that bad, Sharon.’

When I went to meet her from the hairdresser’s she said, ‘Well, let’s see it then.’

The damage was done, what could she do? That’s the great thing about tattoos; you can’t have them removed when your parents go mad … but that’s the problem too.

I now have sixteen tattoos and I hate them. There is no story behind my tattoos apart from stupidity! Well, actually, there are some stories, like I got ‘Daddy’ written on my forearm when my dad had his quad bike accident. I went with Jack on his eighteenth birthday to get his first tattoo. He got my name on his wrist and I got his. I’ve got my mum’s name on my back. The last tattoo I got was ‘Lovely’ written on my wrist and my boyfriend Luke got the same (it’s our nickname for each other).

I do think getting a tattoo is a form of self-harm because it hurts and it’s not fun; it’s a control thing. Already I’m looking into how to get rid of them. What I liked when I was sixteen was not what I liked when I was seventeen and it was definitely not what I liked when I was eighteen. If only I had waited when I decided I wanted a tattoo – I wouldn’t have half of them now.

My dad’s tattoos all represent a different time in his life and they seem to have more of a story than a random dolphin jumping out of the sea plastered on your ankle. At least I didn’t have one of those.

T
HEN
there was the time I decided to get my nose pierced. I’d pre-warned my mum I was thinking about it and straight away she told me not to do it. But I waited until I’d gone away with friends for the weekend and came back and presented it to my mum. She was messing around doing something in the games room, standing in front of the snooker table next to the juke box. I stood there in a black hooded top and khaki trousers waiting for my mum to notice the tiny stud in my nose.

And sure enough she did. Her first words were, ‘Have you had your nose pierced, Kelly? It looks like a bogey. Please take it out.’

I was trying not to laugh because there was nothing she could do about it. But she carried on, ‘Kelly, you are going to be heartbroken that you have a big hole in your nose when you get older. You will regret having that in your face.’