Jeremy Kyle and a dose of reality: How can our obsession with voyeuristic TV end when we love it so much?

On a Saturday in September a 28-year-old woman called Mary Richardson took her own life after drinking beer laced with rat poison. At her inquest, Eliza Withers told how Mary was the lover of her son, Henry, and had lived with her at their home in Hull for six months. She described Mary as quick to anger, and said that on the day she died Mary had been told by neighbours that Henry was with another woman.

The other woman, a Mrs Kirk, was married but her husband was away. Henry had spent the night at her house after drinking with her. Later that night, Mary killed herself by putting three packets of strychnine into a glass of beer and drinking it.

At the inquest, it was reported that a crowd “several hundred” strong, mainly women, gathered and when Mrs Kirk left the hearing they followed her, “hooting and hissing all the way”. She had an escort of four policemen for fear there would be violence against her by the angry mob. An unedifying story, and one with all the elements that make perhaps the perfect Jeremy Kyle Show. A philandering man, an unfaithful wife, copious amounts of alcohol, a tragic death and a baying crowd.

But, of course, it isn’t a Jeremy Kyle episode. It’s taken from a report in the Hull Packet newspaper, dated 16 September 1870. It does, however, flag up two things about human nature; we have always, it seems, immersed ourselves in the minutiae of other people’s lives, the grimier the better. And, given half a chance, we’ll happily transform into a bloodthirsty mob to vent our spleens against those who we consider to be the guilty parties.

The Jeremy Kyle Show, is of course, off the air for what appears to be good, now, following the sad death of Steve Dymond, who is understood to have taken his own life after filming an episode of the show, which was due to be broadcast last week. It’s turned a spotlight on the whole industry of reality TV, the genre which makes “stars” of ordinary people… with, it turns out, some careful scripting, nudging and guidance from the production teams in order to make “good” telly.

Programmes like Jeremy Kyle’s are known as tabloid talk shows, aping as they do the red-top newspapers’ historic tendency to lay bare people’s lives in the most excruciatingly salacious detail. Many years ago I was visiting a friend in the North-east who made his living working for a news agency that mainly serviced the tabloids.

A story had broken in Sunderland, a tale of tragedy and misfortune, and my friend was redirected there as we set off for a night out. While he was doing his doorstepping another, more veteran journalist who was on the scene sighed heavily, unhappy that he’d been dragged away from his home at the weekend. He opined, to no one in particular, “I am fed up of these people and their dogshit lives.”

If that sounds harsh, then that’s because it is. But the 'dogshit' lives of those less fortunate than ourselves have always made for compulsive reading and viewing. At its peak the News of the World was selling more than eight million copies a week. By the ignominious end of its 14-year run last week, The Jeremy Kyle Show was pulling in a million viewers every weekday at 9.25am.

Jeremy Kyle wasn’t the originator of the tabloid talk show, of course; he’s more likely to be the curator of its death. It’s an American invention that probably broke out into the mainstream in 1986 with the launch of the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah encouraged people – the ordinary, everyday folk and celebrities – to open up in a confessional manner, laying bare their secrets before the soothing, encouraging presence of the host.

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Oprah also involved the audience, giving them a space to stand up and talk about the issue of the day. It was an almost intimate, welcoming atmosphere, like perhaps a group therapy session, until you remembered it was being watched by millions of people at home.

The success of the Oprah show inevitably spawned a host of imitators, including The Jerry Springer Show in 1991. London-born Springer moved to the States at an early age and worked as a lawyer, a politician (he ran for Congress in 1970) and a journalist before getting his own show. For three years Springer tried to engender serious political and topical debate on his shows. Ratings weren’t good. In 1994 the programme was relaunched as a more tabloid-orientated talk show and things went stratospheric.

A similar show hosted by Maury Povich had launched in the US the same year as Jerry Springer. Again, it tackled weighty subjects in the beginning, but soon joined the scramble for confessionals and confrontation. By 1998 Jerry Springer was beating Oprah in the ratings and the TV studios were full of angry people, spurned lovers, betrayed spouses, disputed paternities. The discussions got more and more heated and even violent; burly security guards were employed to drag those appearing apart, the audiences got more and more frenzied and riled.

Just like with poor old Mrs Kirk in 1870 Hull, followed home by a crowd that was “hooting and hissing all the way” with “some not very complimentary epithets were addressed to her, some of the mob were armed with sticks, tongs, and pokers, as if they meant to ‘punish’ the object of their wrath.”

Really, Jeremy Kyle entered the arena just as the tabloid talk show was on the wane in America. It premiered in 2005, when Jerry Springer was moving into radio, Ricki Lake had left her own talk show, and Maury Povich tried to get back into more serious TV debate, hosting a show with his wife, the broadcaster Connie Chung, that ultimately drew more ratings.

Brits had been fed a diet of Springer, Ricki Lake and the faux respectability of the Judge Judy show, where the same tabloid grievances were hammered out but in front of a telegenic judge for many years by this point, and presumably the idea by the TV companies was that watching American trailer trash was fine, but why don’t we exploit our home-grown 'dogshit' lives?

Trisha Goddard had begun her own tabloid talk show in 1998, and in 2004 it had moved to Channel 5. Jerry Springer brought his brand to the UK in 2005, the same year that Jeremy Kyle was brought in by ITV to fill the gap left by Trisha. Tabloid talk TV was firmly established on the British daytime schedules. And if there were any fears that we would be more reserved than our trans-Atlantic cousins when it came to baring our souls and rolling up our sleeves for the cameras, then they were unfounded.

Gladiatorial combat ensued, and when the other shows fell by the wayside Jeremy Kyle held firm his position, offering his pronouncements on the parade of undignified arguments and fights, the litany of drugs and booze and sex and personal tragedy, playing to the radged up audience, like a sneering, public school-educated Caesar.

It’s a curious thing. Nobody seems to want to admit to watching the Jeremy Kyle Show, yet a million did so every single day. Who were they? Students? Pensioners? Homeworkers and homemakers? The unemployed?

Probably all of these. And, quite probably, the majority of the audience was working class. Not because they were glad to have some kind of representation on TV, not because they identified with those spitting and snarling and demanding DNA tests on screen, but because, sometimes, it’s something of a relief to know that there are people worse off than yourself.

But that doesn’t make it right. In fact, it makes things a whole lot worse. The Jeremy Kyle Show and its ilk are bread and circuses for the masses. They are the footsoldiers of austerity politics, smoke and mirrors and sleight of hand to keep the impoverished and the disaffected numbed from their own situations. Don’t look at your own problems, they say, look at these people. Laugh at their pain. There but for the grace of God go you, eh?

The real surprise is that The Jeremy Kyle Show lasted 14 years, and would no doubt have gone on ad infinitum but for the death of Steve Dymond. The show must have been a gift to the incoming Conservative-Liberal Democrat government in 2010, with its warnings that the entire country would have to tighten its belts and adopt a Blitz spirit to get through some very tough years.

Why have the populace scrutinising the bankers and financiers and architects of the bad times of the financial collapse when you can instead point to the TV screen where miserable people are screaming blue murder at each other, and shake your head, and say, “Look at this lot and their 'dogshit' lives.”

The cancellation of The Jeremy Kyle Show almost signals a collective sobering up of telly-watching Britain. Everybody’s blinking, and looking around, and wondering what the hell happened over the past 14 years. Human bear-baiting on our screens, every single morning, all week long? How did we let that happen?

And now we’re turning our attention to the rest of the reality TV output. Derided as just trash for so long, we’re perhaps now reconsidering. Trash, maybe, but dangerous trash at that. People are appearing on TV shows and then killing themselves. Are any ratings worth that?

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Of course, The Jeremy Kyle Show isn’t the only reality TV programme to be dogged with controversy. Take Love Island, for example; in the past year two contestants who appeared on the show, Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis, took their own lives. And yet, Love Island endures, with the next series returning to ITV2 in a matter of weeks. Many are asking why; perhaps the answer to the above question of whether ratings are worth lives is Yes.

The finale of Love Island last summer attracted 3.6 million viewers. It’s a prime-time show, whereas Jeremy Kyle was on at breakfast. Love Island is full of beautiful, fit young people. Jeremy Kyle presented the lowest echelons of society as circus animals. Love Island is aspirational, top brands are showcased in the ad breaks. Jeremy Kyle was punctuated with adverts for payday loans and PPI claims.

Has Jeremy Kyle been thrown under a bus, a sacrificial sop to offer evidence that the TV networks do take action, but allowing the more lucrative other reality shows to continue? Perhaps few people will mourn its passing, and we’re well shot of the embarrassing, vindictive, exploitative mess anyway.

But really, social standing and personal grooming of those who appear on it aside, is there any great difference between The Jeremy Kyle Show and Love Island and however many other reality TV shows featuring members of the public you care to mention?

Love Island, Big Brother and the like are at their most popular when there’s confrontation, and anger, and back-stabbing and misery. Nobody wants to watch people sitting around and getting on famously over a nice cup of tea. We like arguments and meltdowns and drunkenness and blazing rows and flouncing off. We adore it when there’s a contestant to whose name we can add the prefix “Nasty”, we want to boo and hiss the pantomime villains who make the other people cry. In short, we love to hate, just like the several hundred-strong mob who followed Mrs Kirk home from the inquest in Hull almost 150 years ago.

But reality TV isn’t a pantomime. There might be similarities, for sure; we know about “scripted reality”, and how situations are orchestrated by the production team. We know that stage directions are whispered in the ears of those appearing on tabloid talk shows — “She said this about you, what do you think of that?” – before they’re pushed on-stage, furious and out for blood. We know that the boring stuff goes on backstage, in the wings, away from the clean, flashy edit we see in front of us.

But even the most booed and hissed pantomime villain wipes off their make-up and goes home at the end of the performance. Those ordinary people who appear on reality TV are merely dumped back in their lives, and the fall-out from what they’ve just endured can, as we’ve seen, prove too much.

Perhaps three suicides from people appearing on TV shows heralds a turning point, and perhaps not, when there’s still money to be wrung out of the format. Time and time again during this piece I’ve referenced ancient Rome, with talk of gladiatorial combat on tabloid TV shows, describing Jeremy Kyle as a Caesar figure, mentioning “bread and circuses”, the phrase coined by the poet Juvenal to describe how government distracts the populace from scrutinising their work too much with palliatives of food and entertainment.

Here’s another one, attributed to the ancient Roman judge Lucius Cassius, who was given to asking when dealing with cases, “cui bono?”

In other words who profits? When it comes to reality TV I think we all know the answer to that.

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