Skip to main content

Was ITV right to cancel Jeremy Kyle?

If you’d asked me this a couple of weeks ago, I would have undoubtedly have said yes.

I’d only caught a few snippets of the show over the years, and in those brief moments was pretty horrified at what I saw. From my very limited viewing, I rapidly formed the opinion that this wasn’t my kind of show.

Why would anyone choose to go on TV to air their dirty laundry, and potentially discover something hideous about another person? Wife slept with your brother? Your sister is in love with your best friend’s killer? Sure – find that out in a TV studio in front of a live audience.

Apart from my bemusement as to why anyone would want to put themselves through that, I couldn’t grasp why anyone would want to watch that happen. Voyeuristic, ghoulish, gaining enjoyment from other people’s misery? I didn’t get it.

But much as I watch F1 and others love the Footballs, we’re all different. It was the most popular of ITV’s daytime shows. It ran for 14 years. So, not for me, but it was certainly essential viewing for many.

After Steve Dymond was found dead a week after taking a lie detector test on the programme, the show was first suspended by ITV and then axed, with an inquiry launched by MPs into the question of adequate support for the sometimes vulnerable people taking part, who often lived out their worst nightmares for the entertainment of others, unable to foresee the consequences.

And that’s the very nub of this –shows like these are taking already damaged people, and making life unbearably worse for them.

So my answer to the original question is now based on a very different set of knowledge to before, but it’s still a yes. It was right to cancel this show... and it should have happened a long time ago.

This post first appeared as part of The Mail's "Taking to the Podium" page, on Monday the 20th of May 2019.

I would have been quite surprised if any of the other opinion-providers had said the show should still be on the air - happily, they didn't. Seems to have been a change in my fellow columnists for this second outing, with one being replaced by one of the paper's own staff (and my contact there).

It's a long way into the paper now (page 27 this time), and I wonder if the format is working. We'll see. I'm certainly less comfortable providing my view on spiky topics like this, compared to my previous remit to write about whatever I wanted.

(Tape Time: No 202 - The Beatles' "Abbey Road" plus a bunch of 7" and 12" singles from 1986.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...