The Lumpen Proleteriat

As part of my schedule at work, I have a late shift one week in three. This means that I get to spend one week in three in the delightful company of daytime TV again. For the one or two of you that don’t know me, this requires some sort of explanation. Daytime TV is the primary reason behind why I started writing all of this stuff in the first place. My football blog, 200percent, started as a general “life, the universe and everything” blog in January of last year. I updated it reasonably regularly, but we lost internet connectivity when we moved from London to Brighton in April. It took five weeks to get it all sorted out, along with a shiny new laptop. I’d moved to Brighton without a job to go to, though, and finding someone that would appreciate my dubious “talents” was always going to be hard work. It took me until the start of July to get one sorted out.

In the meantime, I needed something to fill the void, and I stepped up the blogging, converting 200percent to a football blog, after a brain-sapping five weeks of daytime television. Daytime television is the visual equivalent of morphine. It’s a painkiller that simultaneously takes you to another place. You settle down to watch five minutes of “BBC Breakfast” and, before you know it, it’s lunchtime and David Dickinson is gurning away at you. You slope off to grab a bite to eat and make mental plans to not waste the afternoon, but your food arrives in the middle of “Neighbours”, so you eat it whilst watching that. Then you realise that there’s a classic black & white film on Channel Four and, before you know it, it’s nearly five o’clock, and you’ve got a notepad out for “Countdown”. Another bright summer’s day wasted.

I will regularly return to the topic of daytime TV over the next few months, but this very morning I caught up with my arch nemesis for the first time in months and months – Jeremy Kyle.  Kyle strikes a chord in me that raises my levels of inner rage to such a level that I often have to switch the television off before his wretched programme even finishes. It is a freak show in the same way that “Big Brother” is a freak show, but it is approximately twenty times as offensive. With “Big Brother”, the people going into the house are kind of aware of what they’re getting involved in, and are taking a calculated gamble that they will become famous. The various freaks and monsters on The Jeremy Kyle Show won’t achieve any sort of fame. They certainly won’t get any sort of answers to the (often serious to the point of being life-changing) dilemmas that they face. You get the feeling that there is no screening process – that the guests are merely wheeled on, made fools of, and thrown out afterwards with the garbage.

The stakes have been being raised for over twenty years. It seems like a very long time since the days of John Stapleton wearing pastel coloured jumpers, gently nudging the “issues of the day” in front of an appreciative audience of pensioners. The juggernaut that blew it all apart was, of course, Jerry Springer and, whilst the BBC muddled along with Kilroy (until he went mad and started blaming the Arabs for bad weather and so on), ITV slowly started to raise the stakes with “Trisha”, which introduced the concept of DNA testing on live television, before eventually going into bad taste over-drive with the cretinous Jeremy Kyle.

Kyle’s style is deliberate and obvious, but his subjects often lack the wit to understand that he has such a clear formula and play straight into his hands.  There are always two parties on at the same time as guests – one has been wronged, and the other is the wrongdoer. First up, Kyle allows the wronged party to air their grievances in such a way that the wrongdoer’s behaviour comes across as inexcusable. Then, he allows the wrongdoer to put across their side of the story, but without the adrenaline rush of righteous anger to propel themselves along, they stutter and offer inconsistencies in their stories. At this point, Kyle starts hectoring them, raising his voice in an aggressive manner and siding with the wronged. His voice rises to a level where he is shouting at the wrongdoer whilst gaining appreciative from the studio audience. Then, suddenly, he lets his voice drop and allows the wrongdoer to put their side again, but temper has been raised and the wrongdoer will often be shouting too, aiming accusations back at the supposedly wronged party. In a sudden volte face, Kyle will take their side – exposing the inconsistencies in the wronged party’s original story. The hectoring will now start again, turning up the volume so you have three people shouting at each other and, hopefully (so far as Kyle is concerned) the two guests having to be separated by his big, burly security staff.

Finally, the cherry on the cake. The third guest. Usually, they take the side of the original wronged party. Sometimes they’re planted in the studio audience. They come on stage, already whipped into a frenzy, shouting and pointing their fingers. After a couple of minutes of frenzied creaking, Kyle intervenes,  softening his voice and finally offering a piece of advice so obvious that they could have pulled it from a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant (“trust each other more”, “stop going out night when you should be at home with your child”, “stop throwing bricks through people’s windows”) but, because of the twenty-minute long slanging match that has preceded it, makes him sound like a mixture of Gandhi, Buddha and Nelson Mandela.

It goes without saying that this crass, exploitative dog dirt would, in a just world, be banned in the same way that bear baiting is, let alone broadcast on national terrestrial television. This, however, seems to be the way of the modern world. Cruelty to animals is rightly anathema. Taking people from Britain’s council estates (and before you start complaining, when did you last see someone from “middle England” on Kyle?) and subjecting them to ridicule under the auspices of offering them “professional help” with regards to often horribly distressing domestic situations, though still seems to be fair game.