Was The Jeremy Kyle Show the Best We Could Do?
The Jeremy Kyle Show is ITV’s fallen angel. Scrubbed from streaming services and buried under tainted press, it is left to those of us who were avid viewers to remember the tight grip it held on to the channel.
Filled with sensationalist headlines (“My lesbian niece doesn’t know if her gay ex-boyfriend is the father!” is a personal favourite), the show largely featured working-class people, who were typically labelled as ‘Chavs’, dealing with dramatic and over-the-top family conflict, relationship drama, drug addiction and most notoriously cheating scandals in front of a reactive audience with know-it-all Jeremy Kyle himself at the helm.
The guests were loud, abrasive and aggressive; Kyle’s screaming and swearing pals filled almost all the daytime programming on ITV, bar the old reliables like This Morning (another disgraced ITV show). It ran for seventeen seasons, was sponsored by brands like The Sun and Foxy Bingo, it even had clip shows and Christmas specials. We found it so hysterical that it was parodied for Red Nose Day and became a sort of inside joke. Yet it seems that the national obsession for the show has been lost from the collective consciousness.
The show only came back into the media in September this year, when the inquest into the suicide of Steve Dymond, a guest on the show in 2019, came to its end. The conclusion was that there was no clear link into the death of Dymond and his appearance on the Kyle Show, where he received failed lie detector results that announced he had cheated on his partner. Whilst there’s no clear answer to whether the polygraph test was correct, it has been widely agreed upon that the way Dymond was treated on the show was particularly cruel, especially considering the fact he had severely struggled with his mental health his entire life and was vulnerable when ITV producers recruited him onto the show. However, the re-opening of this discussion around the controversial programme has made one thing clear: The Jeremy Kyle Show was the only show to accurately portray the working-class experience.
I vividly remember sitting in the hairdressers at my local shopping centre and a man wearing a Canada Goose puffer jacket strolling past and my mom saying “See that man there? He was on Jeremy Kyle a few years ago. Something to do with a DNA test, I think.” It’s rare that anybody from the town I’m from in outskirts of Birmingham would ever be on TV, but strangely enough, Kyle’s Show gave people from my background that chance. This was before the days of access schemes to get a proper job at the BBC and before the term DEI included people who were stereotypically called ‘skinheads and chavs.’
The Jeremy Kyle Show gave working-class people the opportunity to share what their day-to-day life looked like and to me, the guests on the show sounded like people I grew up with; they dressed how people at my local shops dressed; their problems, funnily enough, were the exactly like the ones moms and aunties would gossip about in their front gardens, dressing gowns on and cigarettes in hand.
Jeremy Kyle’s programme is one of the only examples in broadcast television ‘chavvy’ people have been allowed to be on screen and be authentically themselves. They were allowed to speak in slang, to swear (even if the audio was dipped), to talk about the difficulties of addiction, of being unemployed, of being single parents. It wasn’t treated carefully all the time, but there are some precious moments in the archives of this show where you can see some sort of beauty in this show come to fruition and people benefit from this experience. There hasn’t been another show where working-class people go on screen and be themselves. No fame attached, no ulterior motive. Just there, being themself.
We’ve somewhat improved since the show’s cancellation. BBC Three’s comedy, People Just Do Nothing, feels like the closest thing we’ve had to true working-class representation, showing the lifestyle of young men on council estates involved in the pirate radio scene. That show is still played for laughs, but feels more genuine and heartfelt as all the creators have come from that scene. This Country captures the rural working-class experience and Man Like Mobeen shows the British-Asian experience of a brother and sister living in inner-city Birmingham. The one problem with all these shows? They’re comedies. They’re inherently designed for laughs. We did laugh at The Jeremy Kyle Show, but those people were not acting for comedy. They weren’t acting at all. That is what we need more of in mainstream media: working-class people just being working-class people.
Words by Jess Cooper
Cover Image Credit: James Johnstone/ Flickr
