Plinth

I know you’ve seen an episode. Even before the show was cancelled, blacklisted, we knew it was a malignant animal – shameful to consume, easy to disavow. How to wriggle out of the awful truth, that it hit every trigger in your reptile brain for conflict, schadenfreude, moralising certainty? ‘Oh, I’ve caught a bit at other people’s houses’; ‘someone sent me a clip once but I couldn’t watch it.’ You’ve watched it. No points will be awarded to commentators who dodge the bullet meant for all of us, responding with excuses or proclamations of superior moral character in abstaining. Whether you watched it or not (you did), the Jeremy Kyle show is worth thinking about very carefully. That’s because it was much beloved by Britain. Love-to-hate is love nonetheless – something in Kyle’s smug, facile character assassinations of vulnerable people resolved a collective discomfort with struggle and difference which we still cannot look square in the face. As austerity bites, political turmoil intensifies and right wing/identity politics square up to each other, there is one comforting thing to be identified in Kyle’s angry-toddler world view: at least it’s simple.

Don’t pity drug addicts – it’s their own sodding fault for being so stupid and selfish! Broken families are easy to fix – THINK OF THE KIDS. Abusive partner? Leave, you idiot. The persona built up by Kyle and into his eponymous talk show cast some of humanity’s most complex issues in the starkest moral light possible. The black and white of JK Land offered solace in an ethical ocean, otherwise grey as far as the eye could see. Echoed in the programme’s reliance on a yes/no format of drugs tests (only bad people fail those) and lie detectors (ditto), Kyle represented a moral touchstone amidst impossible knots of pain, poverty, abuse and subsequent self-medication. I’d venture – don’t @ me – that it’s a similar appeal as that held by Brexit rhetoric and Trump’s ascendance: ‘I’m a straight-talking guy. I call it as it is’ tends to mean the opposite, but it’s clearly hitting as much of a chord now as it ever has.

Meanwhile, the entertainment industry at least looks to be waking up to the danger inherent in this brand of faux-authenticity. Jeremy Kyle (man and show) was cancelled earlier this month, in a kind of panicky scramble which saw its back-catalogue deleted from ITV’s website without warning. The wipe came after guest Steve Dymond committed suicide, shortly after filming an episode in which he failed a lie detector test about cheating on his fiancé. The episode was never aired; while I’m sure bootlegs are probably circling the internet already, audience members (each episode of the Jeremy Kyle Show unspooled in front of a live crowd, see: public hangings; freak shows) reported that Dymond was visibly distraught on stage. In fact, he “collapsed to the ground”.

News of Dymond’s death must have reached producers just in time for them to pull the episode’s plug, but the lag of a few days seems by-the-by. Q: did it really take someone to kill themselves for us to realise the show had (nothing but) problems? A: No, because Dymond was reportedly not the first. Outside the carefully constructed chaos of Kyle’s dystopian talk show, as part of a charming Channel 5 show called Britain’s Worst Husband, the Guardian reported that Erica Pawson killed herself after husband Paul followed Kyle’s repeated advice to end their marriage. “As far as I’m concerned, he destroyed mine and my daughter’s life,” Paul told the Sun. “He’s very aggressive to people he doesn’t know. He shouldn’t be like that.”

No, he shouldn’t. Recent episodes of Jeremy Kyle (see, I watched too) reminded me of observing boisterous children at play, waiting for the inevitable scraped knee – knowing that catastrophe is the only thing which will disrupt the game’s spell, and wincing as its antagonist summons a breaking point. As mothers chant across the world, it will only end in tears – scale up the ruthless insults and emotional turmoil of the playground to adult-size, with all the associated baggage and damage sustained on life’s seesaws and swing sets, and there are real consequences. To stay in the school yard: Jeremy Kyle is a bully. Worse, a sneak – it’s not hard to picture him as the child who would have told the teacher about your passing notes, or asked loudly why your jumper’s cuffs were nearer elbows than wrists. As an adult, he shouted at vulnerable people with substance abuse problems instead of sticking the quiet kid in the ribs – much of a muchness, only less forgivable. Eminently familiar.

We all know Kyle; he is our bully. Collectively, we have nurtured him – rewarded his arrogance with contract renewals and celebrity, crafted an atmosphere wherein his odious brand of holier-than-thou (‘if you loved your children so much, why didn’t you just stop smoking crack?’) was not only acceptable but bayed for by sofa and studio audiences both. Resolve the irresolvable misery! we cried. This woman’s history of abuse and its effect on her own children is too painful to look at squarely – shout at her! This man’s suffering in a cycle of poverty and alcohol abuse is too troubling to unpick – give him what for! The world has so roundly failed this boy at every turn that it’s terrifying to imagine such consummate neglect at the hands of educational institutions, social services and governmental bodies can exist in my country, in my lifetime – make it anyone’s fault but theirs! So much to deplore – just heap it on victims, not systems. Then, zoom out and apply the same logic to refugees, benefit claimants and disabled people to generate a Tory Party Manifesto or a Daily Mail front page.

It’s comforting to think that we’ve done away with Jeremy. While his talk show is cancelled, the insecure impulse to reduce difficulty to division is alive and well. We might be moving away from an era where it’s acceptable to televise trauma so baldly, but it would be naïve to congratulate ourselves on having exorcised the demons which produced it – or the systems which spat so many of Kyle’s guests straight onto ITV’s stage. While it took a tragic incident to end the program’s rise-and-rise, there is no narrowing of cracks to fall through and keep falling. Sorry this isn’t more cheerful: sometimes things aren’t simple.

By Emily Watkins