As An American, Explain Jeremy Kyle

[cj3]

So I'm watching a video saying Jeremy Kyle was evil as hell, but considering American Reality TV, it's just seeming like another Jerry Springer/Maury/Etc

[The Dark Order Inferno]

He was a guy who came from a background of privilege, his father worked for the royal family for decades, who attended all the right schools, and all the right parties and got a TV gig where he would sneer at poor people in a way designed to ensure they leave the show having been publically humiliated, labelled scum and dumped back into their shattered lives with no aftercare. With Jerry Springer, you can say he started with good intentions but went off the rails, but with Kyle the cruelty was always the point.

If he hadn't gotten the TV show, he's the kind of person who'd toss their half drunk Starbucks over a homeless person just for laughs on his way to the investment bank his daddy's roommate at Eton got him a job at. People involved in production have confirmed his utter contempt for the people who appeared on his show wasn't an act.

[Jaws the Shark]

Jeremy Kyle took the basic format of Springer or whatever, and somehow made it nastier. The draw of Jeremy Kyle wasn't just guests - who were all real people, not out of work actors like Springer's often were - bickering and scrapping between themselves, but the host being confrontational too; Kyle would berate and patronise them on television for what he considered to be their misdeeds. So you had these desperate people manipulated into thinking that Jeremy Kyle could solve their problems with polygraphs and staff who were woefully unqualified, then they were then trotted out on television, goaded into fighting, and then humiliated by a rich white man who thought the guests were beneath him for doing exactly what they were expected to do. And it literally ruined people's lives.

It manipulated viewers too, because it was put in a timeslot where the only things on television were nonsense about antiques and property (another television genre I hate for its divisiveness) and promised "explosive confrontation", so it managed to pull all of these bored people into engaging with something that was basically about scoffing at poor and uneducated people for being poor and uneducated. It helped perpetuate a lot of really ugly ideas about class and society in Britain.

If you can find the documentary Death On Daytime - I think both parts are on YouTube on the Channel 4 Documentaries channel - it's well worth watching and tells you everything about how horrible Jeremy Kyle was.

[dirtyoldman]

Was about to say there was a good documentary recently that would be a good place to start.
As mentioned, take the humour (and blatant actors) out of Jerry Springer and replace it with nastyness were the guests were lower class, poor people (strangely all white which was brought up at a court case) and you've got the Jeremy Kyle show.