Free Unbreakable: My New Autobiography by Sharon Osbourne Page B

Bowl is the annual championship of the NFL, the American football league. It’s their equivalent of the Cup Final, and a huge event in the US sporting calendar. But it also attracts millions of TV viewers who have no interest in sport because of the big half-time show and the hilarious, budget-busting ads that run in the breaks. It’s part of the tradition that all the major companies pay a fortune to do a special advert that’s really over the top and funny.
    Ozzy had done one years before, for Pepsi Twist, which showed Kelly and Jack holding the can before turning into Donny and Marie Osmond before Ozzy’s horrified eyes, and it had gone down really well. Then, in 2011, a marketing company approached us about Ozzy doing an ad for a big US electronics firm called Best Buy. It was a really funny idea, and we jumped at it.
    The premise was that new technology moves so fast, it’s hard for old rockers like Ozzy to keep up. The set was like a space station, and they had Ozzy in an intergalactic suit like something out of Star Wars .
    In the ad, he faces the camera, holds up a mobile phone and says, ‘Welcome to 4G!’ before someone shouts, ‘Cut!’ and an assistant wanders into shot to tell him that it’s now been updated to 5G. Of course, Ozzy being Ozzy, he can’t grasp this and he keeps getting it wrong before muttering, ‘How many bloody Gs are there?’
    Enter stage left Justin Bieber, also in an intergalactic suit, who comes up to Ozzy and says, ‘I’ll take it from here,’ before doing a little dance and declaring, ‘It’s Bieber, 6G fever,’ the message being that technology moves fast, so don’t get left behind. The ad ends with me and Ozzy standing on the sidelines watching Justin, and me saying, ‘What’s a Six G?’ and Ozzy replying, ‘What the fuck’s a Bieber?’
    Funny, right? Except that the last bit wasn’t a spoof, because Ozzy genuinely had absolutely no idea who Justin Bieber was.
    Justin was sixteen at the time and still looked really young with a cute teen haircut. He was so sweet and polite to everyone, and he turned up on time and was generally very eager to please. I met his mum, who seemed to be a lovely woman, and his manager was there too, overseeing things.
    Many times you see kids that get an astonishing level of fame quite quickly, and they don’t always handle it well. They crash and burn. But at the time, I remember thinking that Justin was surrounded by good people and seemed very grounded.
    In the three years since then, his image has changed. Three years seems like nothing to us, but when you’re sixteen to nineteen it seems an eternity. So what we have here is basically a child entertainer who is a worldwide pop star. He’s very talented, very charismatic and to all his fans he represents youth, great pop music and fun. Unfortunately for Justin, growing up in the public eye is hideous, but even more so for someone in his position. Historically, entertainers his age in pop music have a short shelf time. It comes with the territory, especially when you don’t write your own songs and your audience is made up of teenage girls. Their taste in music changes just as their taste in fashion does – and what does that do for people like Justin?
    I’ve been pretty hard on him when we’ve discussed him on The Talk , but looking at him as a mother, my heart goes out to him. Yes, he’s hugely successful and making millions for everyone around him. And this business is so cruel, so hard, that I’m afraid it might eat him up and shit him out. As a manager looking in, sure his people are doing a great job. But as a mother , I see this nineteen-year-old pop star who sings ‘Baby Baby Baby’, who wants to be a tough guy, hanging with his mates and causing trouble as most normal nineteen-year-old boys do. But I’m sure his record company and advisers want to hear another ‘Baby Baby Baby’, so there must be conflict within him. I sympathise, because it’s the hardest thing