Jeremy Kyle: No Harmless Student Pastime

More than once as a sixth form student, I abandoned the textbook and spent an hour distracted by the spectacle of ITV’s Jeremy Kyle Show.

By now a bona fide student institution, the gnarly-faced host affectionately dubbed ‘Jezza K’, ringmaster of a blundering circus of personal drama, entertains procrastinators daily, their pen-bereft hands warmed by the age old maxim Things Could Be Worse. And what harm comes from laughing at these villains, students ask; lecherous, adulterous chavs, skulking in their hoodies, slurring their swears… they deserve our scorn, right?

Besides the clear irony of students fending off the after-effects of a night of excessive drinking by passing judgement on the perceived disgrace of others, Jeremy Kyle seriously damages a University culture which would be better geared towards actively challenging stereotypes. Wheeling out the standard costume of joke and banter to make prejudice prettier, students are all too happy to unthinkingly sit and chide from the galleries of a show trial and kangaroo court knocked up for the underclass, and so the currency of poor-bashing in our generation, highlighted in a recent article, as well as the popularity of physiognomic profiling pages on Facebook (thankfully banned), begs to be challenged.

The Kyle Show reflects a historical cultural bias against the poor which has found new expression in recent years, extending far beyond the garish lights of ITV: unimaginative books taking the piss out of chavs, generously bracketed in the ‘humour’ section, furnish our bookshops, whilst online, the meme Scumbag Steve circulates, depicting a Burberry-clad young male who, it is implied, is out to leech off you and nick your stuff. In society at large we constantly reinforce the dichotomy between strivers and shirkers, saints and sinners, the noble people with personal responsibility pitted against the undeserving poor: If two chavs race off a cliff, society wins, or so goes the joke.

The most mangled aspect of the Kyle show is how it consistently berates promiscuity in the underclass, entrenching the weird, social-Darwinist idea that the poor in particular shouldn’t be popping out babies. At the same time, in a blatant double standard, adultery is written off as a quaint affectation of middle class life; the staple student pastime, couched in the harmless rhetoric of saucy scandal.  Because it’s far easier to stand from a position of privilege and mock the lifestyles of people astride the poverty line, to believe they opted in to woe, than to accept that these ‘monsters’ were created by staggering social inequality and our shockingly lax attitude towards it.

Students who grew up on council estates and within working communities probably share the contempt when those who’ll never watch their lives slide out of view judge the common people who dance and drink and screw (because there’s not much else to do). Of course, we have the freedom to make unqualified judgements about ‘Portswood locals’, just as an unqualified surgeon has the freedom to throw a poorly but worthwhile organ in the bin after diagnosing it as useless. But you’d at least hope students could take a more active role in rejecting and challenging these hypocritical stereotypes, the fulcrum of 21st century divide and rule in Britain. However, with welfare as the Tories’ favourite bogeyman, it’s hard to be hopeful.

Check out our article on the students’ fascination with Jezza K here.