Momentarily this week, the world turned upside down and the natural order of things was overturned. The British tabloid press, which has spent much of its existence in the past hundred years demonizing and shaming low income families, disabled people, addicts, alcoholics and the mentally ill, turned on another tormentor of the destitute, Jeremy Kyle.
Kyle, the P.T. Barnum of daytime TV, whose shows resemble a hideous conflation of the Sun's Dear Deidre column and a Stalinist show trial, has finally led to the suicide of a participant in the programme. Hideous and shocking though this is, the only real question this tragedy poses is how it took so long to happen.
For those who are not familiar with the programme, it is hosted by the eponymous Kyle, a former radio DJ who hosted a late night 'confessions' style chat show before he moved to TV in 2005, running his current show for fourteen years.
The show taps into deeply held beliefs about poverty and personal morality that have pervaded British society for centuries. Kyle has spent fourteen years waging a one man war on fecklessness, irresponsible parenting, the workshy, and those who appear to procreate first and think second. The simple morality play is directed and produced for the benefit of an audience high on moral indignation, but which also craves voyeurism and salacious details.
For some, the show is crude class anthropology, Kyle is the audience's Livingstone, slashing his way through the jungle until he finds a seemingly backward and primitive people called 'Britain's Underclass'. The audience gasps at their ways, laughs at their otherness and engages in the joy of judgement and scorn.
Judge Alan Berg, while sentencing a participant in the programme who had assaulted another person appearing on the show in 2007 said: "It seems to me that the purpose of this show is to effect a morbid and depressing display of dysfunctional people whose lives are in turmoil. It is human bear-baiting."
The judge's words are as true now as they were then, and in order for Jeremy Kyle to present this programme, in order for ITV to broadcast it, and in order for us all to watch it, we need to see the participants as less than fully human. It is far too simple for ITV to cancel the show and cast aside its presenter (though he'll be back, don't worry) and in doing so draw a line under this terrible tragedy. Instead all parties, especially the audience must own the hideousness and carnage that has been perpetrated in the name of entertainment.
Consider the death that has brought about this crisis for the show. Steve Dymond took part in the show, alongside his estranged partner, to prove to her that he had not been unfaithful. He agreed to take a lie detector test and it came back negative, indicating that he had not been telling the truth. Shortly after the programme was recorded he died, and whilst it is down to a coroner to record a verdict of suicide, the evidence has been compelling enough for ITV to cancel the show permanently.
It is impossible at this stage to examine Mr Dymond's state of mind, his feelings and his pain before he died, but other participants in the show have been candid about their experiences. Dwayne Davison, voted by viewers as 'the most hated guest ever' attempted suicide after appearing on the show. The Guardian reported that:
Davison was in his early 20s, unemployed and living in Nottingham when he become involved with the programme in 2014. He was in a relationship with an older woman and was convinced she had cheated on him. Seeing the show’s offer of a free lie-detector test to set the record straight, they texted the programme. What blindsided them was the speed with which events took place. A producer rang back and invited them to travel up to the show’s filming base in Salford.
“Within an hour there was a taxi at the door,” he said. “You don’t have time to think about it or phone your family. Once you’re at the hotel, you feel you have to do the show. My mum begged me not to go on.”
Davison said he was never asked by the show’s producers whether he struggled with mental health issues before appearing on the programme, and he signed a contract without being given time to read it.
He admitted he came across as surly and aggressive on the programme, swearing and doubting the words of his partner, while being accused of shoving a fellow guest and being rude to staff. He said this was a result of being kept in a backstage room largely on his own for most a day before filming began. In his telling, he was provoked by Kyle and the producers. “They tell you over and over again when you’re backstage that Jeremy hates people who don’t talk.”
He said he was advised to wear a tracksuit rather than jeans to fit the desired image. “They’re good at manipulating – it’s almost magic what they do.”
In this account of the workings of the show, the dysfunctional lives of individuals who are rarely sympathetic characters in and of themselves, are commodified and sold as entertainment to the public. This ruthless extractive process requires the human raw material to be rushed in front of the cameras in order to perform and then returned to their lives to face the consequences, with a veneer of 'after care'.
A reality TV researcher, Carla Wright also explained how the industrial exploitation of human misery for entertainment worked:
My work, essentially, entailed being a master manipulator. It started with finding the people for the show. Very few people actually called in, so we would usually resort to cold calling. We targeted pubs, hairdressers and even cafes, always in the most deprived areas. “Do you know anyone who might need Trisha [Goddard]’s help?” we would ask, in our warmest voices. Occasionally we’d get a lead – the phone number of someone with relationship problems.
The people we were calling didn’t have money for therapy, and they didn’t know how to access services for help. So we pounced on them, with their lives in crisis, and told them this was a chance to make positive change.
With few exceptions, our contributors were not easy to persuade to come on the show. So we often applied pressure tactics, pointing out that it was an amazing opportunity. We asked the loaded question: “Do you really want your life to stay the same? You’ll get a night in a hotel and a free meal. If you get in the taxi now.”
Two questions raise themselves when reading these accounts of the inner workings of this type of TV format. The first is this: How have so many people from researchers to producers and presenters to viewers lost any sense of humanity and morality?
The producers have argued for years that not only are all participants appearing on the programme of their own volition, but that adequate safeguarding procedures are put in place to ensure the well-being of all concerned. This argument falls apart on close inspection, as it appears that researchers for the show routinely ring pubs, hair dressers and other social institutions that vulnerable and low income people frequent. The account above on how research was conducted on the Trisha show shows that manipulation was a key part of the process.
The second question that must surely be asked is how so many of us have allowed ourselves to become participants in a process of mass stupification and distraction? Unlike more conventional and lethal forms of addiction, the passive dependency that so many people have on shallow, meaningless entertainment serves much the same purpose, that of mass distraction. Media theorists once assumed that this was some clever trick on behalf of society's ruling classes to keep minds soft and lazy and prevent the possibility over revolution. The truth is rather more mundane, it is audiences who choose this sadistic entertainment in order to distract themselves from themselves.
The whole gamut of tabloid culture and consumerism works in lockstep with alcohol, drugs and other addictive substances and behaviours to bring about the condition of stupification, where people can avoid engaging with authentic feelings. The Jeremy Kyle show existed because of the demand for it from the viewing public, a demand part based on indifference to its cruelties and part based on our hunger for sensation and distraction.