Following in the steps of rockers Ozzy Osbourne and Gene Simmons, 63-year old Quebec singer/song writer Claude Dubois is starring in a reality show about life with his 27-year-old wife and their young daughter. The series debuted Tuesday on the V network.

Dubois made headlines two years ago when he accused CBC television of being racist against Canadian Francophones, when he and other French-speaking inductees were left out of the televised broadcast of the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Dubois’s decision to do the show, Dubois en réalité has made him the butt of jokes in la belle province. La Presse journalist Marc Cassivi wondered aloud whether the award winning Dubois was suffering from the negative side effects of “a bad dye job, too much dope or a H1N1 vaccine.”

Dubois has been a popular fixture of the Quebec entertainment business for nearly five decades. He began his career at 12 in the country-western band Les Montagnards and had a successful rock career in Quebec throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

His life has been a colorful one and may indeed make for interesting TV. In 1981 he was arrested for drug possession and spent a year in the Le Portage detox centre. After his detox, he released one of the most successful and critically acclaimed albums of his career: Sortie Dubois (Dubois is Out) which sold more than 200,000 copies.

Throughout the 1990s he performed live to thousands of fans, but suffered a stroke at the start of a concert series at the Montreal Casino in 1998. In May 2007 he released the award-winning hit album Duos Dubois with a number of popular Quebec singers, including Celine Dion.