Yes, it led to copycat confrontation-heavy, bear-baiting chat shows (Jeremy Kyle) or reality shows (Keeping Up with the Kardashians) or dating shows (Married at First Sight); yes, it paved the way for race-to-the-bottom Channel 5 documentaries about men marrying wooden bannisters or Channel 4 poverty porn like Benefits Street. But we are confident we’d never sink that low again. We like to feel superior. We have aftercare now. We are above it.
It came from archive footage – specifically the episode titled, “I’m pregnant by my brother”. I watched a two-hour exposé about all the ways willing, naïve, mostly uneducated people were exploited in the name of viewing figures and scandal, about the scale of the lives and families ruined across its nearly 4000 episodes, and my first response was still to ogle them, still to brandish them incestuous sickos and lowlifes. The Jerry Springer era of TV is over, but that nasty impulse within us remains.
‘If I could execute someone on TV I would’ says Richard Dominick in Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action (Photo: Netflix)
Fights, Camera, Action is an engrossing documentary. Former producers tell us things we reasonably already know – like the supremacy of audience ratings and the limitless tactics permitted to chase them, the manipulation of its participants by plying them with booze (or worse), how they would rehearse arguments backstage and incite violence, and the ripple effects of the programme’s destruction. But they operated at such evil extremes you can’t believe they are willing to show their faces.
But there is no real mea culpa here, no real reckoning. Sobering testimony from the son of a woman murdered by her ex-husband the day their episode was broadcast in 2000, whose tragedy was lost in the sensation of the programme, is not enough for those involved to accept blame. It is with a grim kind of pride that they look back on it. They opened Pandora’s box of trash TV and astutely cashed in on the grossest human weakness for voyeurism, taboo, and disgust.
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Read MoreHe was often celebrated for that self-effacing detachment. But what he was really doing was asserting that the types of people he platformed, encouraged, or entertained, were beneath him. The confronting Fights, Camera, Action ought to remind us that those people were really his victims, and there is no moral high ground in delighting in their misery.
‘Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action’ is streaming on Netflix
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