The inquest into the death of Steve Dymond, the unfortunate man who was found dead a week after his appearance on the Jeremy Kyle Show in 2019, gives one the odd feeling that society has changed a lot in a short time, while at the same time not having changed at all. The days are gone when daytime TV was synonymous with the likes of Jerry Springer – the originator of the three-ring circus school of television – and his English imitator Jeremy Kyle; now it’s a much more sedate affair, with the likes of Homes Under The Hammer providing a low-level buzz of banality to accompany one from breakfast to tea-time. But that doesn’t mean the moral high ground belongs to us.
The daytime TV witch trials may be over, but the woke trials of social media are alive and kicking.
Unless in one’s dotage, ill or a shift-worker, there was always a taboo around watching daytime TV; in a world where being ‘super-busy’ was a favourite boast, the idea that you had so much time on your hands that you could spend half an hour watching a bickering expat couple do up a chateau made you about as socially sought-after as herpes.
In theory, the recent rise of both ‘working from home’ and the desire for more of a ‘work/life balance’ (both called ‘skiving’ where I come from) should have been a boost for the televisual equivalent of bottomless brunch. But the rise of the streaming channels (you can watch all kinds of lurid things with your Weetabix these days, if that’s what turns you on) means that terrestrial TV ratings are no longer what they were all across the board; the daytime kind has been no exception. It started with the cancellation of Neighbours and culminated last year in Phillip Schofield being dragged away kicking and screaming from ITV’s weirdly-popular This Morning show, in which he and co-presenter Holly Willoughby attempted to see who could win an endless game of concerned-face against a selection of experts on everything from anorexia to zoophilia. As for unbridled daytime TV savagery, the nearest you’ll get to it will be on Loose Women.
But it was once so different – and it started with the late Jerry Springer, whose fascinating story illustrates the concept of ‘dumbing down’ better than any other showbiz career.
Born in Highgate Underground station during the World War Two bombing of London, his parents were Jewish refugees who had escaped from Germany. Springer was raised in New York, qualified as a lawyer and worked for Robert Kennedy’s campaign in 1968. Politically liberal, he was Mayor of Cincinnati and won ten Emmys as a news anchor in the city; his move into talk shows in 1991 started suitably, with guests of the likes of Jesse Jackson discussing issues like gun control, but something was missing.
That something was ‘human interest’; that is, human beings being interested in things which aren’t strictly their business. But if someone is determined to ‘share’, it would be rude to turn them down.
In 1994, the show began to focus more on sex than social issues, featuring generally working-class people – ‘trailer trash’ to use a bigot’s language – confronted by their family, friends or Significant Other after being caught out, generally in a sexual situation. Interestingly, Springer once said that the shows about people marrying ponies or carrying out self-circumcision didn’t draw in half the crowds that plain, old-fashioned ‘cheating’ did. The topic of infidelity was the raw material of 99 per cent of US talkshows; you never really believe those stats about there being a man shortage until you’ve seen three programmes in one day in which two girls who look like Victoria’s Secret models fight over a bloke who looks like a pomegranate.
By 1998, Springer was beating the Oprah Winfrey Show in many cities. He was keen on the ‘lie-detector test’; Dymond took one on the Kyle show after being accused of being unfaithful to his partner. The audience’s reaction to his supposed ‘guilt’ was predictable; his son Carl Woolley said at the inquest in Winchester: ‘Jeremy Kyle had got the crowd to…boo at him and stuff…he was cast as the liar before he had even spoken.’
Kyle, who said to Dymond during the un-broadcast episode, ‘Be a man, grow a pair of balls and tell her (your partner) the…truth’, defended his presenting style. He said at the inquest that his approach ‘was direct, but it was empathetic, it was honest’. But Dymond was, his son said, ‘very down’ following the incident. He was spoken to by the programme’s after-care team on three occasions after the show was filmed.
‘Duty of care’ is talked about a lot with reference to TV shows in which ‘ordinary’ people are involved (like showbiz folk are notoriously mentally-tough and well-balanced!) but this can only take place if there is candour on both sides. The inquest heard that Dymond had taken overdoses three times previously and been diagnosed with both a depressive and a personality disorder. Yet a former member of the show’s aftercare team Steph MacDonald told the inquest that Dymond’s history of self-harm and suicide attempts was not listed in a letter from his GP.
What the show did, or did not know, is the subject of debate at the inquest. But the nature of shows like Jeremy Kyle is that public humiliation can be a key part of a discussion about the guests’ often messy personal lives.
Jeremy Kyle is now to be found doing nothing more aggressive than shooting the breeze with fellow hacks on the online-only Talk TV; Jerry Springer died of cancer last year at the age of 79. We do not mourn their TV heyday and congratulate ourselves on living in more civilised times. But I find it difficult to believe that the situation has been improved. It’s a bit rich for people to get all high and mighty about how mean Springer and Kyle were when a far more intense form of mob-rule exists on social media. This has fuelled everything from misogyny to anti-Semitism, which is, in turn, played out in real life in instances like the silencing of women’s meetings by the Black Pampers and the anti-Jewish hatred exhibited on the streets of our capital all too often over the past year. The bullies on X who threaten women who stand up for their rights with rape, torture and death make the Jeremy Kyle Show look like CBeebies.
I believe in free will and adult agency and the obvious fact that nobody is forced to be on social media if they don’t want to be, so I wouldn’t ban X any more than I would have banned the Jeremy Kyle Show. But it’s hard to say why one’s OK and the other rightly condemned to the scrapheap of cultural history.
Daytime TV by its nature had a narrow constituency; those who watched it were adults, unless they were truants, who generally have better stuff to do than sit at home watching selected Nolan sisters having a barney with Janet Street-Porter.
Nowadays, a quarter of children under seven in this country have ‘smartphones’; by the time they’re teenagers, they can’t be separated from them. Then we wonder why we’re witnessing an unprecedented epidemic of mental disorders affecting so many children, particularly in the United States. It’s because they’ve got a ticket to Bedlam 24/7.
Zoe Strimpel wrote amusingly here recently of a type she calls ‘the Keffiyeh Karens…these Miserable Misses spreading their Mean Girl power and making life unpleasant for workers or students trying to go about their business.’ The hatred for Stringer and Kyle was mostly snobbish, appealing as they did largely to a working-class audience. Hatred today can be practised with impunity by the educated – so long as the target is approved. The daytime TV witch trials may be over, but the woke trials of social media are alive and kicking.
Julie Burchill is the author of Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics
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