Jeremy Kyle is set to return to TV screens, months after his eponymous chatshow was cancelled following the death of a participant who had a failed a lie-detector test.
ITV’s director of television, Kevin Lygo, said the presenter was piloting new programmes for the channel, in addition to working on his investigative strand The Kyle Files: “He is a consummate broadcaster and it would be absolutely wrong to apportion blame of the show against the presenter of it.”
However, there will be no return for The Jeremy Kyle Show itself, which was cancelled in May after a participant, Steve Dymond, was found dead shortly after recording an episode. His death not only led to the cancellation of a show once compared to human bear-bating, but also prompted a parliamentary inquiry into a new duty of care for all individuals appearing on reality programmes.
Lygo said that ITV suspended production of The Jeremy Kyle Show as soon as it heard of Dymond’s death, which prompted the broadcaster to realise that the format was no longer suitable for the modern era: “You think, would we start a show like this today? You’d say no. It was fine in the past but today you wouldn’t have something that was a conflict resolution show that was so combative and – at times – aggressive. What worked for over a decade suddenly looked a bit anachronistic.”
The ITV boss also said the British television industry had just experienced “one of those moments that comes along every decade in television”, where it is forced to change how it operates.
(July 4, 2005)
The first episode of the Jeremy Kyle show is broadcast on ITV
(January 11, 2007)
The show is nominated for a National Television Award in the most popular factual programme category.
(September 24, 2007)
A man appears in court after head-butting a love rival while appearing on the show. During the trial the judge described the show as a form of 'human bear-baiting'.
(November 26, 2008)
The show is criticised by Ofcom after it broadcasts a guest saying the 'clearly audible' word 'cunts' in the direction of the audience before the watershed. ITV said 'the word was not edited out due to human error since it was not heard over noise from the audience and the theme music.'
(July 15, 2009)
A 26 year old man is jailed at Peterborough Crown Court for grievous bodily harm. He assaulted his 23 year old female partner after they had appeared on the show together regarding infidelity. The show's producers 'absolutely refute' the judge's claim that the show exploits 'the foolish and gullible'.
(March 18, 2010)
The 1,000th episode of the show is a Coronation Street special, with actors from ITV's flagship soap taking part in the show in character.
(September 19, 2011)
Kyle attempts to export the format to the US, but the American version is cancelled the following year
(September 23, 2013)
An episode is broadcast that Ofcom subsequently finds has breached the broadcasting code for not providing enough information to viewers to 'assist in avoiding or minimising offence'. During the episode a 17 year old girl was called 'a silly anorexic slapper' and a 'crackhead' by her elder sister.
(March 15, 2016)
On Easter Sunday morning the show broadcasts an episode subsequently deemed to have breached broadcasting rules with offensive language, aggressive confrontations and sexual references.
(October 26, 2016)
Kyle is knocked over by a guest as a brawl erupts during a sequence entitled 'I'll prove we're not sisters - can you prove you're not on drugs?'
(May 13, 2019)
The show is suspended after it emerges that a guest has died shortly after appearing on the show. All past episodes of the programme are removed from the ITV Hub catch-up service, and repeats are ended on other channels.
(May 15, 2019)
ITV announces that the show is to be taken off air permanently.
(June 25, 2019)
MPs on the Commons culture select committee condemn the show as a forum for tearing people apart in a 'Roman Colosseum-type way'. Kyle himself declines to appear before the MPs, although executive producer Tom McLennan does.
Despite this, Lygo told an audience at the Edinburgh television festival that he had never considered cancelling Love Island – a ratings hit among young audiences that will now be shown twice a year – after two former contestants took their own lives.
“I don’t feel there is a direct connection or enough significance to cancel Love Island because someone who was on it has gone through a tragic experience,” he said, pointing out that the two deaths happened some time after the contestants appeared on the programme and adding that suicide was a complex issue.
ITV has had a torrid year, with the controversy over The Jeremy Kyle Show combining with a falling share price. Lygo said he hoped BritBox, the ITV-controlled streaming service it is launching with the BBC later this year, would allow the commercial broadcaster to build a new revenue stream by charging viewers who wanted to see classic British television. But he also pointed out that traditional television channels still reached millions of people, even in the face of declining overall ratings and an industry-wide collapse in youth audiences for live viewing.
The veteran TV commissioner also urged channels to stop producing travelogue programmes where “a bunch of B-list celebrities go off to Mykonos and look at their feet”.
Instead, he is hoping that a forthcoming ITV programme called The Masked Singer – in which celebrities perform songs while hidden beneath outlandish costumes and the audience has to guess their real identity – will be a hit.
However, Lygo admitted that there were risks with transferring the successful US format to a British audience: “The challenge for the production company is avoiding the reveal being ‘who the fuck is that’? They got Donny Osmond and La Toya Jackson, we’ll probably have Su Pollard and Christopher Biggins.”
In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here
