The Jeremy Kyle show is a modern coliseum that exploits its
participants and disempowers it audience for the benefit of the show’s staff
and nothing else.
The ITV website classifies The Jeremy Kyle Shows core
audience as ‘Young, Female.’ The show presents vulnerable people who are in
need of help and support as an ‘other’ to secure the identities of its core
audience. The ‘others’ presented are in a compromised position. They are often
unemployed, addicted to substances or dependant on the benefit system and there
is always opportunity for public conflict between them. In short, the audience
can sit back and be glad that they are not in the same position. That is not to
say that this is just a coincidental by-product of a publicly aired family
therapy session. The audience is in fact encouraged to react this way by the
shows antagonistic, bigoted tyrant of a presenter Jeremy Kyle, whose opinions
are forced down the throats of the participants and the audience at every
opportunity. Kyle’s constant opposition to what he sees as the attitudes and
apathy of the underclass of Britain helps to amplify the audiences shock, pity
and resentment, thus reinforcing their identity as independent young
individuals, successful in their own right in todays “broken society.”
In Theodore Adorno’s essay ‘How to watch Television’ he says
“the technology of television production
makes stereotypy almost inevitable. The short time available for the
preparation of scripts and the vast material continuously to be produced call
for certain formulas.”
While ‘The Jeremy
Kyle Show’ is not scripted as such, it is common knowledge that the shows
researchers ask the participants for specific information to be disclosed to
the audience and ask them to talk about certain subjects. The shows staff are
constructing stereotypes and characters for a story line that they craft out of
the available material provided to them by the participants. The shows unwitting participants are presented
as a representation of everything Kyle opposes, regardless of their individual
lifestyles, morals and position in society. The production is not intended for
the wellbeing of the participants as the premise of the show suggests, but for
the entertainment of their target audience and for their ratings. This is even
more despicable when it is considered that they bait the participants onto the
show by offering services such as DNA tests, lie detector tests and family
therapy. ‘The Jeremy Kyle Show’ is far from an appropriate therapeutic
environment to provide such services, even if family therapy and ‘fixing Britain’s
broken society’ was their primary objective. The shows psychologist is called
Graham Stanier. His job title is ‘head of aftercare’ and it is an appropriate
one, as his job seems to be cleaning up the mess after the public, ritual
humiliation of the participants.
Adorno speculates “what
matters in mass media is not what happens in real life, but rather the positive
and negative "messages," prescriptions, and taboos that the
spec-tator absorbs by means of identification with the material he is looking
at.”
In providing an apathetic, drug-addled, ignorant and wholly
monochrome stereotype of Britain’s underclass, the ‘Jeremy Kyle Show’ is guilty
of furthering class division by presenting them as an ‘other’ to be observed
and criticized, but not engaged with on a human level. Not only that, but by ignoring
key therapeutic concepts like empathy, the show disempowers the observer by
supposing that such things aren’t needed when relating to and aiding others. It
is institutionalized bigotry and absolves responsibility to form educated
opinions on fundamental class issues in British society from its viewers and
places it in the hands of Kyle as institutional figure head.
It may be presented
as “reality television” but it is in no way a realistic representation of the
demographic or the therapeutic process it claims to portray. Proper ‘aftercare’
might include an empowering, empathic debate about the issues raised and then
an organised man hunt to destroy self-serving ego-maniacs like Jeremy Kyle.
Bibliography
Adorno, T. W. (1954)
The quarterly of film, television and
radio
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