![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It was just laying into people.” It seems that the way guests were treated was a reflection of a top-down belittling culture. “I saw a lot of times where Jeremy had gone really, really over the top and it was uncomfortable in the studio” says one producer. In fact it was seemingly essential that he was viewed – and certainly viewed himself – as better than the people appearing on his show. The answer is surely that Mr Kyle had no interest in relating to them. One documentary participant – the camera operator whistleblower who turned over footage to the DCMS committee – questions how Mr Kyle, who was privately educated and whose father was private secretary to the Queen Mother, could possibly relate to his mostly working-class guests. Her face is blurred out but her discomfort is palpable and she speedily escapes backstage. In one clip, he cajoles a young, female member of the production team on stage to sarcastically ask about her holiday and encourage her to take a seat as if she were a guest. “He wasn’t pleasant to anyone,” one staffer recalls. He insults the studio lighting and furiously complains about people talking without his permission. We see him slag off the audience and the crew. It is the footage that never aired as part of the original show that is most telling though: a sort of blooper reel revealing that Mr Kyle’s venom was not reserved for his guests. Time and time again, he shouts “LIAR!” while brandishing the show’s polygraph results. “You’re a disgrace to society,” he says to a heroin addict. Scenes of Mr Kyle snarling in the faces of his distraught guests are familiar. He waded in – sometimes literally, into the middle of physical fights – and delivered scathing judgements. Mr Kyle, who is now slated to be a presenter on Rupert Murdoch’s forthcoming TV channel Talk TV, offered more than a hand on the tiller. By that point, exposing lives being ripped apart on television had become the norm. The noughties’ TV nasty menĮvery weekday, at 9.25am, Kyle would strut on stage, an amalgamation of noughties TV nasty men: the savagery of Simon Cowell, the dehumanising language of Fat Families’ Steve Miller and the arrogance of chef Gordon Ramsay. The man whose signature snark was crucial to the show being ITV’s most popular daytime offering had chosen to extricate himself. In July of that year, Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee launched a formal inquiry into the British reality television industry.Īlthough executive producer Tom McLennan, on-air counsellor Graham Stanier and ITV chief executive Dame Carolyn McCall all gave evidence, Mr Kyle himself declined a request to appear. In May 2019, the circus unravelled when a participant, Steve Dymond, took his own life a week after recording. ![]()
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