The Beginning of The End of Trash TV? (Part 1)

"Tomorrow I'll be berating multi-billionaires over their tax affairs (and personal affairs if our legal advisers allow us)"

The demise of "The Jeremy Kyle Show" last month probably justified my long break from writing about all things TV. It is now well documented that one of the participants committed suicide after failing the show's infamous lie detector test, which was too much for TV bosses after nearly one and a half decades' worth of mocking, sneering, provocation, aggression and occasional violence involving the incredulous underclasses, all MC'eed by its well-educated, middle class host, displaying his special brand of moral superiority.

In truth, the programme should never have been considered for broadcast in the first place. We all thought the excesses of American talk/debate shows like that of Jerry Springer would never adorn our small screens, didn't we? But the London-born Springer is actually a first-class presenter/writer/journalist and his show often came across as a self-conscious parody despite the chaos that often took place, with his inevitable 'final thought' in the end. 

The concept of the parallel talk/debate show was extant well before Kyle, Springer, Phil Donahue or Kilroy. David Frost brought this kind of thinking onto television as early as the 60's, and considerable controversy sometimes followed even then. Publisher Felix Dennis was thought to have been the first person to say the C word on British TV during a live broadcast in 1970, much to Frost's chagrin, and three years earlier, he was accused of encouraging 'Trial by Television' when confronting the insurance fraudster Emil Savundra, with a number of his clients in the audience that had been defrauded. Savundra contemptuously described such as "peasants", but it was obvious Frost had won this particular battle with the cries of "Well done Frostie!" ringing in his ears at the programmes' end.

An increasingly fractious Emil Savundra on "The Frost Programme" (1967)

It's interesting that such a programme brought an individual who had accumulated wealth via criminal behaviour to be shouted at and berated by its host and the audience (Savundra was tried, convicted and jailed shortly afterwards for his crimes), but this was 1967 when such depictions had never really been screened before, with the vain, egotistical Savundra presumably thinking he could sail through such a facade flawlessly, but the clever and well-informed Frost had other ideas . The millionaires and billionaires of the present day are now too worldly wise to even remotely consider such an enterprise, crooked or otherwise. Any media appearances are rare or carefully stage-managed, if they bother to say anything in public at all, so having a host ask them about their financial or tax affairs along with a hostile audience is simply a pipe dream, and if they did, legal action would certainly follow suit. So the easiest solution is to search for uneducated lower class oiks with no money and exploit their incredulity by sneering at their immoral personal lives and reinforce stereotypes of lazy, promiscuous, aggressive and violent scroungers and skivers who deserve our scorn and don't deserve money off the welfare state. Kyle and his producers knew exactly what they were doing, and were given carte blanche by ITV bosses regarding such freak shows. I myself had brief contact with the programme when a mature student at university, not to watch but to help other fellow students who expressed an interest in attending recordings. Several problems ensued, and the show rather brusquely told me they didn't want any more contact. It was rather typical of the contemptuous attitudes the programme encouraged in its lengthy 3,000 shows plus existence, so seeing it taken off the air for tragic reasons described means that it got its well overdue comeuppance in the end after years of complacency and arrogance. If we were to look a generation or so back at how it used to be on morning/daytime TV, the contrasts are like being from another universe. The schedule for Yorkshire TV from May 23 1975 is sedate, mild, uncontroversial, perhaps dull, but thankfully inoffensive; no Breakfast TV, just Schools programmes from 9.30 am until 12 noon, followed by a few innocuous children's shows from Granada TV, a light entertainment show, then two short international and local news broadcasts, followed by another Granada programme, the much-missed and near legendary "Crown Court". This was an era when the unions were all powerful with stagflation and industrial unrest signalling the last stages of the Keynesian post-war consensus, so any remote possibility of a Kyle-like dressing down of the working classes at this time was a way-out fantasy, though it eventually came into fruition three decades later when trade union influence was all but dead, corporatism had replaced industrialism, and deregulated TV was now a sponsored, money-making commodity of hundreds of channels rather than a carefully regulated collection of just three channels (ITV, BBC 1 and 2), a communal not fragmented viewing experience. 

After the Kyle controversy, one may have thought ITV would have looked twice or more at last year's ratings champion "Love Island". There have been two suicides that could be directly associated to the programme by former contestants Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis, or perhaps even a third, if the suicide of Ms Gradon's grief-stricken partner may also be taken into account shortly after her passing. This programme and Kyle claim to have after care and psychological support mechanisms for those more vulnerable participants, but in these days of Social Media that can easily have hundreds if not thousands of media trolls berating such with vicious personal abuse, and the return to ordinary life after being under a national microscope, it appears such support has failed. The programme makers desire for increased hype and viewing figures is deemed more of importance than the well-being of discarded participants. What is the criteria of psychological profiling in the application process? Are vulnerable individuals told it would be in their own interests to be rejected? There have been obvious failures in such a process, and even the technicians union, BECTU, are now expressing their concerns behind the scenes, implying they could ask members not to operate cameras and walk away if other similar tragic incidents happen again.

Both programmes and others have been accused of encouraging the penchant of 'Trash TV' on our screens, particularly since the dawn of the 21st Century. The origins of so-called Trash TV are not entirely clear. In TV's apparent golden age of the 60's and 70's, there was certainly classic and seminal TV, but it was mostly dull if not disposable television that was broadcast. Trash and sensationalism were virtually non-existent, aside from the odd lapse into nudity and bad language being broadcast live (the most notorious example being the interview between Bill Grundy and The Sex Pistols in 1976). Perhaps the first genuine stirrings were in 1982 with the 'adult' version of the childrens' show 'TISWAS, namely the controversial 'OTT', both made in Birmingham, with much of the same cast (Chris Tarrant, Lenny Henry, John Gorman). The crude slapstick of the former, mainly comprising buckets of water thrown over anybody or anyone in sight, came across as anarchic and actually well-timed punctuation; in the latter more explicit counterpart that followed, it appeared like the stupid, drink-fuelled antics of youths on an Ibiza bender, with the added distraction of custard powder being mixed in with water and scantily-clad young women mostly on the receiving end. Yet in the midst of predictable outrage, Clive James, perhaps the most respected TV critic of the time, praised it in his Observer column as "..a real television breakthrough...the...performance from the OTT dance group Greatest Show on Legs was one of the funniest routines I have ever seen on television" (i.e. when the naked men involved covered up their intimate regions with rapidly deflating balloons). James perhaps envisaged the future of TV as his opinion on the show was very much against the grain of general thought; OTT was soon cancelled after further disgust was expressed, but the show was clearly ahead of its time.