I'm back from hell

AS an 18th birthday party it was a tame affair...a quiet lunch party attended by family and friends with the guest of honour drinking nothing stronger than cups of tea.

But birthday boy Jack Osbourne could not have been happier. He was just glad to be there after a year he was sure would end with him dead.

The wild child son of rocker Ozzy and Sharon had become trapped in a spiralling cycle of drink and drugs. At his lowest point he even attempted suicide, taking a potentially lethal cocktail of alcohol and the painkiller OxyContin - better known as "hillbilly heroin".

"I was convinced I wouldn't make it to the end of the year," admits Jack, who celebrated his 18th birthday two weeks ago.

"I wasn't happy when I was sober or when I was getting high. But I couldn't stop drinking or taking drugs.

"It was a vicious circle and I couldn't see any way out of it other than by killing myself."

Seven months later Jack is now clean and sober after two months in rehab. His dad is with him every step of the way.

"Dad's about eight days in front of me," says Jack. "

OK, I know he's said that he'd stay clean in the past and still ended up using, but he's doing really well this time. I reckon it's the first time he's been really serious about it. In some ways, the fact that I had to go to rehab woke him up.

"We also made a deal. He wears this charm on his necklace which he's had for ever but if he relapses he has to hand it over to me." Things are also looking up for Jack's career. He presents his own chat show Union Jack on Channel 4, which begins today at 12.55pm, and also stars in the second series of The Osbournes. He has also made his first movie.

Jack left rehab with a new vice - smoking - but while his every sentence is still liberally peppered with the f-word, a sensitive rather shy teenager lurks behind that loud-mouthed front.

"It's not easy to suddenly have your life portrayed on camera," he says.

"I was only 16 when The Osbournes started and I had to adjust to the fame. I'm not going to sit here and say there weren't a lot of perks, but it was hard to deal with all the attention. "Sixteen isn't a fun time for a lot of people and for me it was a real dark time."

The darkest was when his mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. "I was convinced she was going to die," he says.

"Drinking made a lot of things go away and it made living a lot easier.

"I pretty much drank anything I could get my hands on - vodka, whisky, beer, Smirnoff Ice.

"As for drugs, I was taking a lot of painkillers, anything that took me out of reality. I kept taking more, drinking more. I couldn't do this thing called fame any more."

He reached his lowest point in early April when he crushed and swallowed six pills of OxyContin - a painkiller often prescribed for the terminally ill - and washed them down with absinthe. Was it a cry for help?

"I wouldn't describe it as that. A cry for help is when you take a whole bunch of pills and then call someone. My attitude was take it, get into bed, and see what happens. I didn't care whether I woke up or not."

HEAD pounding and with an achingly sore throat, he did wake up the next morning. But it didn't deter him, until his mother, alerted by a friend, told him he was going into rehab. He says: "Mum came to me and told me, 'pack your stuff, you're going away'.

All the signs she had been noticing suddenly made sense to her, how I was being really flaky and not going to work.

But I bolted, went to a friend's house and spent the night there."

Yet it proved a turning point. "I looked around at every single person there, who they were, how old they were and what they were doing with their lives.

A lot of them were near 30, unemployed, living off their parents. There were heroin addicts - the world's biggest couch potatoes.

"I realised that I didn't want to be like that. I didn't want my life to be controlled by a drug. I want to be in control of my life."

On April 23, he checked himself into a detox programme in Pasadena, California, and stayed for two months.

Jack says: "I felt relief that I could let go and someone else could take charge. But that did not last long.

I was soon calling Mom and Dad saying, 'I hate it, please get me out of here'. But then I got serious about it. The people at the centre treated me like anyone else, another kid who needed help." Not surprisingly, his parents blamed themselves He'd started drinking and smoking pot at 13 and was allowed to party until 3am. "They felt and still feel a lot of guilt about it," says Jack.

"No parent likes to see their kid in that state. In familytherapy they kept saying, 'we wish we'd set more rules'. "But I don't blame them," says Jack.

"They were dealing with their own things. My dad was more or less having a mental breakdown because of my mum's illness.

There was really no-one to sit and watch what I was doing.

"Anyway, it was in my genes. I knew from when I started drinking that I had a problem with addiction. I never smoked until I went into rehab, now I've replaced one addiction with another. I keep telling Mum and Dad that it would happen sooner or later."

The stress put a strain on his parents' marriage, but Jack hoots with laughter at reports that they split up for a time.

"Mum didn't leave Dad! They're so co-dependent. She went away for the week, and that's it. "Mum didn't know what to do about me. She was talking to dad, but he was still getting f****d up and she left him. He got cleaned up and said he was serious. Me going into rehab woke him up.

"Mum had also spent a long time in denial over her illness She brushed it off, saying it was nothing, because she was trying to protect us. She's fine now and been in remission for eight months."

Jack goes to hour-long meetings of Alcoholics Anonymousor Narcotics Anonymous every day, and his former party-loving friends have also cleaned up their act.

"They blame me for the fact that they don't go out boozing any more. I still go out to bars or clubs, but I just don't go out as much."

He doesn't have a girlfriend right now. "You're not meant to in the first year of sobriety, as it blocks your recovery," he says. But he is at pains to put the record straight about one girl in his past - Catalina Guirado, star of I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!

"She used me," he says angrily.

"She'd come over to LA to start a music career and one day she asks me if I wouldn't mind going to get some lunch. Someone took pictures and suddenly she was telling people we were dating.

"I haven't spoken to her since. She's not my type anyway. She's a little too tall. It's hard to find a girl with the right intentions in LA. They usually want to see what they can get out of you." Jack insists that he and his big sister Kelly are close, despite their volatile relationship on The Osbournes.

"Kelly just loves a good wobbler, a good solid argument, every now and then," he says.

"We don't hate each other - we just get reallypissed off with each other." After bit parts in teen dramas Dawson's Creek and That 70s Show, Jack has landed his first movie role alongside teen stars Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen as their band manager Justin in New York Minute.

"Yeah, it's OK," he shrugs.

"If I get a part in a movie, then I get a part in the movie. It's not like I'm going to have acting classes, go to auditions every day.

I won't refer to myself as an actor. If you're not an actor, then what are you? "A tosser," he says with a half-cheeky, half-sad grin. Then he loosens up and says:

"My parents are happy about the film, I guess. They think it's better than sitting on my bum all day." And he is excited about that new Channel 4 show, Union Jack, which begins a 13-episode run today.

"It's pretty much just going to be the cameras following me around LA," he says. "It will be tongue in cheek, with interviews with celebs in weird settings, like going grocery shopping with Marilyn Manson. Justin Timberlake, who is a friend of mine, has agreed to come and teach me how to dance."

JACK will be competing for guests with his mum and her SharonOsbourne Show. "She's my rival now," he says. "She's always on about 'do you think you can get such and such on my show'. Now I'm like, no, I want them on mine."

The family are together for the second series of The Osbournes which started on Friday. "This one is different to the first one," says Jack. "Then we had the attitude of, 'we don't really know what we're doing but let's go with it'.

"This time it's a lot less innocent. There'smum's cancer and dad was on tour a lot while we were filming and so was Kelly. The family dynamic doesn't come into play as much."

And Jack will be appearing in another series, even though he said he would never do another. So what changed his mind?

"Money. They came to us with a really nice cheque. Plus we're still good for it, so why not?

MTV seems to think so and they're good at judging what's hot and what's not. "It's been a really rough year but during the past few months the family has come back together. Mum's healthy and the rest of us are doing well.

"I'm happier than I have been for a while." Then a flash of the old, pessimistic Jack comes through. " I don't want to jinx it so don't write that. Just say that 'I'm all right Jack'." features@sundaymirror.co.uk

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