With the rise of feelgood telly and the fall of the ITV talkshow host, antagonistic entertainment is losing its power
Get off your backside and get a job!” “Can you even spell father?” “Put something on the end of it!” For 14 years, The Jeremy Kyle Show was a hotbed of insults, poverty porn and lie-detector-facilitated humiliation. A dark jewel in ITV’s daytime crown, it was once described by a judge sentencing a former guest as “a form of human bear-baiting”. It was, however, just one wave in the tsunami of mean-spirited TV entertainment to emerge over the past two decades, ranging from the fiscal misery of Benefits Street and The Repo Man, to talent-show contestants milked for cheap laughs, to reported emotional abuse on augmented reality shows.
It is all a far cry from the turn of the millennium when Big Brother was billed as a revolutionary social experiment. Since then, reality TV and factual entertainment has taken on an often nasty and voyeuristic tone. But does the high-profile cancellation of Kyle’s show – following the death of recent guest Steven Dymond and stories of two further participants killing themselves – spell the end of vindictive reality shows? Or are we doomed to see the continuation of what was described by one producer in a recent article for the industry magazine Broadcast as a “wild west of pantomime villains”?
Continue reading...posted from The Guardian
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