First night review: The Osbournes, MTV

Radio 4 used to run a series called "Relative Values" in which Dr Michael O'Donnell examined the lives of extraordinary families – one-parent families, three-parent families, no-parent families, step- families, foster-families, adoptive families, families with gay parents (or children), families with severely disabled children (or parents); families coping with the death of a child, families coping with too many children, and so on.

The point was to show what an elastic term "family" is – you don't need Mum and Dad and two kids and a detached house; you just need to feel as if you are a family. Which brings us to The Osbournes, which made its first appearance on British screens last night.

In America, MTV's fly-on-the-wall documentary about the Beverly Hills home life of Ozzy Osbourne, Birmingham-born heavy-metal god, has been a surprise hit, with audiences of eight million, easily MTV's most popular series.

On the back of this success, President Bush is reported to have invited the Osbournes to the White House, the family has signed a multimillion-dollar contract for a second series, and Ozzy himself is reported to have been paid $2m (£1.4m) for his autobiography.

Given Ozzy's notorious history of alcohol and drug abuse, and his reputation for biting the heads off small livestock (he once decapitated a dove during a meeting with record executives), you might look forward to some extreme behaviour.

But watching the British debut last night, it soon became clear that, by Dr O'Donnell's standards the Osbournes are almost suffocatingly normal.

The family set-up is stereotypically nuclear: mum, dad and two children; Jack, 16, and Kelly, 17. A third child, Aimee, the oldest, moved out before filming started. Reports suggested she was trying to start a career in the music business, and worried that she might be held back if people connected her with her family.

True, Jack likes to dress up in combat gear and stalk round the back garden with a bayonet. True, the pink-haired Kelly seems to have a short fuse and a gift for minor domestic catastrophe (a comic highlight of last night's episode was a kitchen-fire that started when Kelly put the kettle on the stove to boil some water – she had not registered that it was an electric kettle).

And Jack and Kelly fight like cat and dog, something the programme illustrated by splicing some of their scuffles with footage of the family pets squabbling. The family also has a penchant for powerful obscenity, so that the phrase "bugger off" seems more conciliatory than abusive.

But then, if you filmed any family with 50-some cameras for several months, you would inevitably come up with some moments of vicious conflict, and quite probably some fairly fruity language.

What comes through most strongly is the affection Ozzy and his wife, Sharon, feel for one another and the children. The Osbournes have their amusingly dysfunctional moments, but what makes this series enjoyable is seeing just how functional they are – they feel as if they are a family.