By ninemsn staff
He got through eight minutes of a live-to-air interview without a profanity, but Ozzy Osbourne swore at the final hurdle during an exclusive interview with Richard Wilkins this morning.
Ozzy and wife Sharon were chatting to Nine's entertainment guru live from Los Angeles on the TODAY show and were discussing their impending tour of Australia when the veteran rock star had an Osbournes moment.
Sharon joked that her husband planned to bite the heads off koalas and crocodiles during a wildlife safari, almost prompting a cuss from Ozzy.
He managed to suppress a rude word and admitted "I find it very hard to speak without saying a profanity", which drew congratulations from Wilkins.
"You've done very well, Ozzy — thank you," he said.
"Whaddya mean, it's f****** great!" Ozzy bellowed, as Sharon tried to cover his mouth.
"Well, there it is," a slightly flustered Wilkins laughed as he wrapped up the interview.
Later on, TODAY's entertainment editor admitted he was "a little shocked and stunned" despite being aware of the dangers of an Osbourne interview.
"We'd been pushing for a while to get Ozzy live to air: we'd been offered an exclusive face-to-face with him in Melbourne on Friday but I'm actually going to be in LA, so we pushed to get him before I went to Los Angeles," he said.
"My producer said to me, 'what if he's late' and we thought of all the possible things that could go wrong but we didn't actually imagine that he'd drop the magic word.
"By the end of the interview, I realised we'd been kind of lucky so I said 'thanks mate, you've been a good boy' and he dropped it.
"It's a bit of a shock to be interviewing someone on breakfast television when you've got a lot of people out there watching and they drop the f-bomb, as it were.
"But hey, he's always entertaining ... I thought it was pretty compelling televison, I've got to say."
Ozzy and Sharon had been discussing the success the family had enjoyed since filming five seasons of The Osbournes, a documentary-style reality TV show that has since been copied by celebrities including rap star Snoop Dogg and Kiss bass guitarist Gene Simmons.
Ozzy has since met Queen Elizabeth II and enjoyed newfound success with his band Black Sabbath, while Sharon maintains a high profile in the UK as a judge on the talent show X-Factor.
They will be joined on their Australian sojourn by their children, with son Jack set to film a documentary about their travels and Kelly joining her parents on screen.
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