I watched Channel 4’s documentary Jeremy Kyle Show: Death on Daytime out of morbid curiosity. In the days since it aired, Kyle has released a statement saying that “the false and damaging allegations made against me by Channel 4 are with the lawyers now”. But surely it just spells out what we’ve all known for years: that it was an odious show which humiliated its guests and called it “tough justice”.
I knew some of those guests. I grew up in Rotherham in the mid-Noughties, the era of the child grooming scandals (it had yet to be called “grooming”), two roads from one of the area’s biggest children’s homes, and two doors from a notorious heroin dealer. I wasn’t exactly friends with the people who ended up on Jeremy Kyle but knew them well enough to feel an uncanny emotional vertigo when one of them appeared on TV. Why would anyone do this to themselves, I wondered, as a poor girl was belittled about how many men she’d slept with.
