Free Unbreakable: My New Autobiography by Sharon Osbourne

enables people to get free testing. We don’t do research; it’s more like a helping hand, enabling patients to get to and from treatment as well as providing other kinds of practical help, using volunteers.
    The show involves a solid month of filming, six days a week, so it’s a big commitment. But I thought it would be good to do. If you get through to the final, you can raise nearly a million dollars, so that’s all I thought about when it came to saying yes or no. I had never watched the show, not a single episode. I’d seen the ads, but of course that’s just a montage of rapid-fire clips. I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into. Silly, silly me.
    It’s a game, of course it is, but this was gladiatorial combat. I didn’t know that I was to be pitched against the other contestants and goaded into believing that everyone is out to get you. As it was for charity, I imagined it would be more supportive and laid-back, so I went into it in total innocence and with a warm, fuzzy feeling of loveliness towards everyone… that lasted for about five fucking minutes. It was a vipers’ nest.
    There were seven men and seven women. On the women’s team, there was Holly Robinson Peete, an American actress and singer; former wrestler Maria Kanellis; Olympic gold-medal swimmer Summer Sanders; Victoria’s Secret model Selita Ebanks; comedienne Carol Leifer and singer Cyndi Lauper, who turned out to be the one saving grace. I absolutely loved her. I had met Cyndi, but this experience brought us much closer together. I had also met Holly, though I didn’t know her well. The rest of the team were total strangers.
    It was horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible. One minute you’re there thinking it’s going to be a bit of fun, the next you’re running across the city in a muck sweat thinking, Fucking hell, what have I got myself into?
    And the producers wanted you to start bickering with each other, as it makes better telly. They would get you on your own and tell you that one of your team-mates had just said something derogatory and inevitably you would become paranoid, thinking, Bloody hell, did they really say that? It did my head in – I just hated it.
    From day one, everyone started to make allies, plotting in corners about how they were going to bring you down. At one point, some of the other women had a go at Cyndi, who was very passionate, very animated and, shock horror, had an opinion. She was doing the show to support a gay charity and was very determined about doing well to raise funds for it, and for some reason the others started giving her a hard time and taking the piss.
    So I said, ‘Listen, this is Cyndi Lauper you’re talking about, who the fuck are you? Don’t be so disrespectful to this woman.’ I became her protector, in a way, because she’s a lovely person with a huge heart and there she was being ridiculed for effect on a bloody TV show. I wasn’t having it. I made it very clear that despite their nefarious efforts to get more airtime and to gain notoriety by being bitchy, it was all going to end up on the cutting-room floor because they were fucking nobodies compared to Cyndi. I think it’s fair to say that we weren’t getting on as a team.
    We were miked up the entire time, and so the whole world got to hear us constantly sniping at each other. I don’t get it. When men compete, they are very straightforward about it; it’s rarely personal. But women so often seem to get behind-the-back mean. It’s a fatal flaw of our gender. Cyndi kept saying to all of us, ‘It’s just a TV show, don’t take this personally,’ but we didn’t listen, we all took the bait. More fool us.
    I came within seconds of walking out several times a day, but there were the potential winnings to consider. How could I give up that chance? I’d have been called a quitter, and rightly so. But God, it was a tough show to do. It was a total guilt trip because they knew that you wouldn’t walk out on