Ozzy Osbourne is grateful his family podcast has given him "something to do".
Ozzy Osbourne is grateful for his family's podcast
The 75-year-old rocker has been unable to perform live in recent months due to a string of health issues - including Parkinson's disease and problems with his spine - so he was pleased his son Jack came up with the idea of them launching an audio series as it's been a great distraction from his medical woes.
Asked why the family had launched the podcast, Ozzy - who is also joined on the show by wife Sharon and daughter Kelly - told Spin.com: "Well, my son, really. My son Jack spoke to us all, and because I’m laid up a bit these days — these last five years have been pretty rough for me — it gave me something to do besides sitting down and thinking about myself while I’m recovering from my very heavy surgery.
"He said, ‘Why don’t we do a family podcast?’ and he started his company, Osbourne [Media], and we did it.
"It’s a lot of fun. I enjoy doing it."
The quartet first invited fans into their lives with their MTV reality series 'The Osbournes', which ran from 2002 to 2005, but Ozzy thinks such fly-on-the-wall shows are not "raw" enough any more.
He said: "It's really interesting because people love the Kardashians. They took it one stage further. They saw what we did and said, ‘That’s a good idea,’ but they organised themselves.
"What they do now is kind of scripted reality. It’s not raw. It’s not the real, real reality.
"With our show, what you saw was what really went on. It wasn’t contrived. It wasn’t scripted. Because at the end of the day, every season, my wife would sit us all down and go, ‘Alright, what do you want to do? Do you want to do another season or not?’ "
And the 'Paranoid' hitmaker admitted he "lost interest" in his show when producers wanted to force certain situations on the family.
He added: "After the third year, the [production crew and MTV] started to ask us to do things that we wouldn’t normally do. At that point, I lost interest in it.
"I mean, what they call reality TV now is really not reality."
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