#Cult animosity shows no up tv

Guests were supported by the programme and welfare teams prior to filming, throughout filming and after filming. In response to the allegations made in the documentary, ITV said “The Jeremy Kyle Show achieved many positive outcomes where people were able to resolve personal problems. Afterwards, they were left taking calls from former guests threatening suicide.ĭeath on Daytime builds the case that The Jeremy Kyle show was a poisonous framework, riddled from top to bottom with engineered cruelty, while senior producers and ITV top brass turned a blind eye as long as ratings were high.īut it also exposes the show’s ringmaster as central to this rot, with behaviour on and off camera that traded on degradation and aggression.Īt one point, someone is asked whether The Jeremy Kyle Show could have existed without Jeremy Kyle. They were trained to stoke animosity, firing up participants, in order to ensure the most explosive of interactions. “You think you can speak to people however you want.” “I think that the show gave him, and it gave many of us, a God complex,” says a whistleblower. But what seems to linger most is their guilt at their own complicity in manipulating the people they brought on stage. They frequently worked 14 or 15 hour days with requests to order dinner denied by bosses if they hadn’t made a booking.

#Cult animosity shows no up tv

There is much in the documentary that points to a team of junior staff, mostly working class and in their first TV jobs, put under unimaginable pressure to book guests. Opinion | The return of Jeremy Kyle to TV is a scary prospect in times of economic struggle 07 April, 2022 Jeremy Kyle Show: Death on Daytime was a scathing bombshell of an exposé 11 March, 2022 Jeremy Kyle says he was diagnosed with anxiety disorder after TV show was axed, ahead of new talkRadio slot 04 September, 2021 It was just laying into people.” It seems that the way guests were treated was a reflection of a top-down belittling culture. “I saw a lot of times where Jeremy had gone really, really over the top and it was uncomfortable in the studio” says one producer. In fact it was seemingly essential that he was viewed – and certainly viewed himself – as better than the people appearing on his show. The answer is surely that Mr Kyle had no interest in relating to them.

One documentary participant – the camera operator whistleblower who turned over footage to the DCMS committee – questions how Mr Kyle, who was privately educated and whose father was private secretary to the Queen Mother, could possibly relate to his mostly working-class guests. Her face is blurred out but her discomfort is palpable and she speedily escapes backstage. In one clip, he cajoles a young, female member of the production team on stage to sarcastically ask about her holiday and encourage her to take a seat as if she were a guest. “He wasn’t pleasant to anyone,” one staffer recalls. He insults the studio lighting and furiously complains about people talking without his permission. We see him slag off the audience and the crew. It is the footage that never aired as part of the original show that is most telling though: a sort of blooper reel revealing that Mr Kyle’s venom was not reserved for his guests. Time and time again, he shouts “LIAR!” while brandishing the show’s polygraph results. “You’re a disgrace to society,” he says to a heroin addict. Scenes of Mr Kyle snarling in the faces of his distraught guests are familiar. He waded in – sometimes literally, into the middle of physical fights – and delivered scathing judgements.

Mr Kyle, who is now slated to be a presenter on Rupert Murdoch’s forthcoming TV channel Talk TV, offered more than a hand on the tiller.

By that point, exposing lives being ripped apart on television had become the norm. The noughties’ TV nasty menĮvery weekday, at 9.25am, Kyle would strut on stage, an amalgamation of noughties TV nasty men: the savagery of Simon Cowell, the dehumanising language of Fat Families’ Steve Miller and the arrogance of chef Gordon Ramsay.

The man whose signature snark was crucial to the show being ITV’s most popular daytime offering had chosen to extricate himself. In July of that year, Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee launched a formal inquiry into the British reality television industry.Īlthough executive producer Tom McLennan, on-air counsellor Graham Stanier and ITV chief executive Dame Carolyn McCall all gave evidence, Mr Kyle himself declined a request to appear. In May 2019, the circus unravelled when a participant, Steve Dymond, took his own life a week after recording.