The Jeremy Kyle show has taken some flak and for good reason. It may have a gloss of morality about it, but Kyle's manner wouldn't have been out of place at a medieval assizes, where the wretched received their comeuppance from strutting demagogues before a baying pack of their peers. Yet this is commercial television; not a public service, just a consumer product. Drawing in the punters and the advertisers is inevitably more important than the mental health of random members of the urban underclass.
So if the show presents itself as a moral forum, it deserves all the right wing derision and left wing sanctimony that can be heaped on it. But aren't we all guilty by association? In bygone centuries, how many of us would have cheerfully taken the wife and kids to the local asylum to stare at the loonies, or, better yet, to the local gaol to witness a good hanging? Even in our supposedly enlightened times, aren't we all guilty of schadenfreude, whether we're enjoying slapstick sitcom suffering or simply relishing the news stories telling of people other than ourselves dying horribly in plane crashes and other acts of malign fortune. It's a pretty rational human response to see suffering and be grateful or glad that it's not happening to you.
From there, it's only a small step to enjoying the suffering of the wretched as light entertainment. The Kyles and Springers of this world have been unfairly isolated. How dull would The X Factor be if the desperate and damaged were less willing to humiliate themselves for our viewing pleasure? Even compos mentis performers are persuaded to play their bereavement cards to guarantee that emotional money shot. For my filthy, guilty money, lonely eccentrics murdering soul standards is far better value than Timberlake-clones covering them competently.
How would 'You've Been Framed' and 'World's Scariest Videos' fare if footage of nasty accidents happening to people other than us wasn't such good, wholesome fun for the whole family? As for Big Brother, this is nothing more than petri dish television with bacterial life on either end of the microscope. No offence.
So, I may watch Jeremy Kyle in a knowing, ironic, post-modern way, but I'm still complicit. In fact, I'm probably more complicit, because I should know better. Human suffering has always been entertaining, but at least our ancestors were less hypocritical about it. Rant ends.
guinnessorig
I caught a glimpse of 'The Jeremy Kyle Show' this morning. It’s like peeling back a bandage to look at a festering boil. Or checking inside your handkerchief after a good nasal clear out. Morbid fascination. But it’s too easy to view Kyle’s programme as a freak show. Come see the Siamese twins, be astounded at the bearded lady, laugh yourself sick at the toothless amphetamine addict clapping their diseased gums over an ex-boyfriend’s lie detector results... The huge difference between Victorian ‘freaks’ and the shambling participants on Kyle’s show is that the latter aren’t suffering. They’re triumphant. The teenage Dad who has made his girlfriend’s mother pregnant. The absentee Mum who wants to be reunited with the family she deserted in 1991 for the bass guitarist in a Stranglers tribute band. The thirteen year-old twenty stone anorexic who wants a ‘babby’. You might look at them with an air of superiority. Financial. Moral. Intellectual. But they themselves are all victorious. Happy as pigs in shit. Don’t kid yourself - they wouldn’t want to be you. You’re not as cool as them. As free. They embody the spirit of freedom. The genius of unshackled individuality. And the air time is theirs.
The mirror is broken. The reflections fractured.
Kyle’s guests celebrate their lives on our TV screens. The ‘underclass’ have nothing to be ashamed of. And with Kyle’s collusion they justify seedy standards of living by the very act of their stories being featured on television, being discussed and debated. In the same way that the health service does stitching up their assault injuries, providing them with their free medication, the police recording their crimes. And slowly we – the tax-paying, thinking majority – slowly we too accept the aberrations as normal. As acceptable. The fact is we have outlawed morals. And there are few taboos left. Any attempt to restrain, condemn or curb the activities of anyone doing almost anything is met with liberal disdain. Mary Whitehouse has lost. She’s been gunned down by AK-toting homies on 'Grand Theft Auto', her protests drowned out by the orgasmic screams of some glossy cheerleader getting a set of knuckles shoved up her vagina on fistfiesta.com. Because whether it is violence in video games or the glut of accessible pornography on the internet, or some knuckle dragging troglodyte from the local tower block shouting the odds about the benefits of taking his son to a brothel (today’s theme), our acceptance of behaviour and standards of expectation are invidious. Sedimentary. Layer by layer. OK, so not every child who plays 'Bitch Slapping Homos' on the PS3 will go out and murder random shoppers in the mall, but perhaps he’ll not think twice about giving someone a kicking on a Friday night in the pub. In the same way not everyone who watches internet pornography will jizz on their girlfriend’s face. But you’ve thought about it, haven’t you…?