The Jeremy Kyle Show inquest leaves bleak reflection: How was it still airing only five years ago?

Footage was revealed for the first time yesterday amid the inquest into Steve Damond, a man who is suspected to have taken his own life a week after he filmed an episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show. The episode never aired, and the incident lead to The Jeremy Kyle Show being pulled from the TV schedule of ITV – it had aired from 2005 to 2019. As an inquest into the death Steve Dymond, 63, rages on and with Jeremy Kyle himself still defending his own conduct and the show – the released never before seen footage of the episode has proven to be a startling and horrifying watch that makes me think how on earth was this show still getting produced in great quantities as recent as five years ago? The Jeremy Kyle Show is a dark stain on British TV history, and we’re all guilty of barely giving its cruel nature a second thought.

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From the moment it was released, The Jeremy Kyle Show was critically panned. Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer opined that “the show is built around creating a spectacle out of the damaged fragments of people’s lives” – and it really did feel like that. Looking back, the format was horrifying. The live audience and the way Jeremy Kyle paraded around in an insufferable display of arrogance made it feel like a Colisseum. We’ve all got friends who went to be in The Jeremy Kyle Show audience. Maybe you reading this were one of them. The audience of The Jeremy Kyle Show could often be seen grinning, laughing – as the show’s contestants got belittled with jeers and a pontificating Jeremy Kyle. Whilst the show said it was there to help people, it constantly felt like it wanted the messiest arguments and maximum hysteria to make the audience gasp accordingly. A truly nasty affair.

It is wild to think it took what happened to Steve Dymond to finally get The Jeremy Kyle Show off air. By 2019, we had seen the majority of what felt like truly exploitative TV end. The X Factor’s nasty way of recruiting the most volatile auditionees it could find to get in front of the judges had stopped, and Big Brother’s casting had changed. Love Island had changed its aftershow care after the tragedies that befell Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis – as well as Caroline Flack taking her own life shortly after The Jeremy Kyle Show got pulled from air, with many calling for Love Island to follow suit. You’d think in 2019 we were way past everything The Jeremy Kyle Show was giving to audiences. Many of whom didn’t clock its deep rooted issues til after it left airing and it was reflected on.

BREAKING: Moment Steve Dymond finds out lie detector results in unaired Jeremy Kyle show footage played in court.

Warning: this video contains distressing images.https://t.co/F3w04WBo9N

📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/kZKAUEYnvh

— Sky News (@SkyNews) September 5, 2024

Jeremy Kyle has in this inquest defended the show. He claims the stories featured on the show were “a journey”, with conflict and resolution. He has described his presenting style as “it was direct, but it was empathetic, it was honest”.

In the revealed footage, Jeremy Kyle can be seen barking at Steve Dymond saying “The truth of the matter is you, mate, you did make up a cacophony of lies, you can sit there looking upset, people could look at this and think it’s dodgy.

“The test says you are lying, pal, you failed every single question.” Steve Dymond maintains his innocence and that he was truthful and had never been unfaithful. Kyle replied in the footage: “The studio thought you were telling the truth, I wouldn’t trust you with a chocolate button mate.”

Jeremy Kyle refutes that he humiliated Steve Dymond and that he didn’t encourage the audience to jeer in his presenting style. It’s all baffling, and deeply sad. However the inquest concludes, five years on from The Jeremy Kyle Show getting pulled from air just has me reeling that we ever let it go on so long. Its recency, forgotten by how much the country has been through with the pandemic and all that has followed, is overlooked. We can’t forget how cruel TV was just a mere few years ago.

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