Jeremy Kyle Show: Death On Daytime review — he rested upon a demonised class we rarely saw anywhere else

Jeremy Kyle

ITV/REX

What this documentary did very well was explain the culture of the show, which was cruel, cultish and pseudo-journalistic. This was the culture of the red-top real-life exposé; messy lives shovelled up, splayed out, then dumped. You can’t do that to people if you think about it, but there are tricks you can play on yourself to make sure you don’t think about it. “We were a cult,” said one. “I know I hurt people,” said another. All of them were speaking on condition of anonymity, I suppose because they were well aware of the risk of becoming hate figures. Many of them came from similar backgrounds to the guests. As one put it, “You needed a bit of Kyle in you to work on Kyle.” Or in the words of another, “We were rough as toast.”

The modus operandi, as they described it, was pretty clear; you find your messed-up story, and you groom its participants into even greater fury. Then just before they’re about to blow, you put them on screen in the hope that they do it there. The real damage was what followed, as participants went home, back to the lives they had just blown up. Because as another producer explained, it wasn’t just that contestants were publicly humiliated. It was also that in the process, by definition, they were estranged from anybody who might help them pick up the pieces afterwards.

All of this was devastating. There were two things, though, that I thought the documentary could have done better. The first was examine the character of Kyle himself. We saw him a bit, shrieking at people in outtakes, but never quite enough to know what this meant; whether he’d always been a bully and a demon, literally all the time, or whether he was just somebody who liked to camp it up for the audience. Certainly, he’d dehumanise his guests on camera, screaming at them while they sobbed and so on, and in ways that were hard to watch. But why was it all so mesmerising to watch too? Why was he so good at it? Because he was. Better than anyone. Springer included.

Also neglected, more hauntingly, was any proper understanding of what was going on with the guests in the first place. Dymond took his lie-detector test to prove to his partner that he hadn’t been cheating on her. She, Jane Callaghan, was interviewed here. She was tragic, she was broken, she would never recover, she had a tattoo of Jeremy Kyle’s signature on her arm she had done afterwards. “Afterwards?” said an interviewer here, cautiously. “Afterwards,” confirmed Jane, brightly.

Jane Callaghan, who was Steve Dymond’s fiancée

Similarly, early on we met a woman who had gone on the show with her heroin addict daughter. The daughter, so thin and ill, was humiliated and screamed at and — such was the accusation here — even falsely led to believe that she needed to put up with it because she was competing with other addicts for one hotly contested place in rehab. Yet in the end she did go to rehab and stayed clean for 15 months. Her mother still says it was the best 15 months they ever had.

That, I think, is the bigger story here and it’s a much harder one to tell. Yes, Kyle was a monster, and yes ITV presided over a culture that turned his crew into monsters in his image and left them to deal with that on their own. A second tragedy, indeed, struck the show after it came off air, when a young producer took her own life too.

All of that, though, rested upon the existence of a demonised class we rarely saw or see anywhere else. “Only in America,” we told ourselves when we watched Springer, but Kyle taught us we had them here too; people who saw maniacs headbutting each other over dubious lie-detector results on daytime television for the sick amusement of the mob, and thought: “Yep, this is it, where’s the phone, that’s my best chance to fix my terrible life.” And, worse still, they weren’t even wrong.

Top Boy is back for season two, or perhaps season four, depending on where you start. You may remember it as a Channel 4 gangster series from 2011, starring Asher D of So Solid Crew (kids, ask your dads). Having been dropped in 2014, it was picked up again a couple of years ago by Netflix.

Ashley Walters (Mr D, as was) still stars as Dushane, drug kingpin of Hackney’s fictional Summerhouse estate, keen to go straight after one more big deal. His former partner Sully (Kane Robinson) has a similar dream, while Jamie (Micheal Ward), who has just escaped a jail term, is pondering his career choices too. Over in Spain, meanwhile, we meet a local murdery drug dude who — you won’t believe this — is keen to go straight. In fact, this show has in it so many drug dealers who don’t want to be drug dealers that you end up wondering why there are drug dealers at all. Shenanigans in Spain, at any rate, threaten to derail Dushane’s plans.

Top Boy will be forever likened to The Wire, as it should be, but the similarities are granular rather than crass. It is particularly good at the mechanics of life in the criminal underworld; the hassles of money laundering, man-management and so on. There are subplots about urban gentrification, generational ambitions and police harassment, which is not always necessarily unwarranted. Being a largely black show, it’s also simply chock-full of obvious British acting talent who, equally obviously, don’t get nearly enough roles of this heft and depth. Time to pretend you’ve been watching it for years.

WeCrashed is the story of the most glamorous janitors in the world. Can you believe that Jared Leto, who plays the Israeli WeWork founder, Adam Neumann, is 50? The guy looks like a teenager. It’s just not right. His Israeli accent is very annoying. Indeed, you might even say it’s more annoying than Anne Hathaway, who plays his wife, Rebekah. And I don’t mean her voice. Just her.

Actually, who am I kidding? I normally quite like Anne Hathaway. It’s just women who hate her, like with Keira Knightley. Her and Leto together in WeCrashed, though, are so annoying that, two episodes in, I was almost ready to bail out.

What we have here is the story of a multibillion-dollar business that soared and then plunged. It wasn’t a con, as such, because WeWork still exists, even if Neumann himself lost control of it after growing somewhat erratic. Nonetheless, after The Dropout, The Tindler Swindler, the Fyre Festival thing, that Anna Delvey thing and maybe a couple of others I’m forgetting, I do feel as if I’ve recently seen this sort of story an awful lot. Plus, Neumann is said to still be worth about a billion dollars, which is a crash I could personally cope with.

Another problem, I think, is that WeCrashed takes a while to settle on what story we’re actually getting. We meet Adam as a spiv on the up and Rebekah as the yoga-instructor cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow. He’s driven, but also a stoner flake, which is a weird combination that I don’t think quite lands. She’s much better drawn; a boho New York princess with a conflicted, Lady Macbeth undercurrent of wifely conservativism. Having gritted my teeth and made it through episode three, I want to know much more. It will be her who keeps me watching, not him.

Much more interesting than either, though, is the lure of WeWork itself. Neumann grew up on a kibbutz and his business partner, Miguel McKelvey (played by Kyle Marvin), came from a commune. There are flashes of the millennial yearning to which a co-working cult could be the answer; rootless gig-working young professionals who can spend days speaking to nobody unless they go to a coffee shop. Only flashes, though, and it’s a shame. Never mind this hipster Enron nonsense. That’s what this one should be all about.

Holding, finally, is a new detective series based on a novel by Graham Norton, who isn’t in it, and directed by Kathy Burke, who isn’t in it either. There, though, end my complaints. We’re in a small village in County Cork, and builders demolishing a house have just uncovered some bones. For solid reasons (it’s on his ex’s farm; he’s in possession of a wedding ring) these are presumed to be those of a guy called Tommy, who inexplicably (until now) didn’t turn up to his wedding 20 years previously.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that. The jilted fiancée in question is still around, in the shape of Brid (the brilliant Siobhán McSweeney, formerly known as the nun headmistress from Derry Girls), but so is the jilter’s mistress (keep up), Evelyn (Charlene McKenna), who is now (deep breath) shagging the teenage son of her sister’s girlfriend. Read that twice, you’ll get there.

The bones, anyway, must now be investigated by local village copper Sergeant Collins, played by Conleth Hill, whom you may remember as Varys from Game of Thrones, but only if you’re really paying attention because he’s almost unrecognisable. A panicky overeater, and not all that professional (you’ll see), he has been joined by a flash and perhaps brash detective from the local seething metropolis, which I think might be, um, Cork.

None of this is wildly new for anybody who saw, say, Broadchurch before it went mad, but it is done with enormous charm. More importantly, you get a strong sense that — apparently like the book — whodunwhat is going to be less important than getting to know each of these promising characters and all of their secrets. He’s one of those people, Norton, who is reliably good at everything he ever does, so I have high hopes of thoroughly enjoying this too. Even if I don’t expect to enjoy it quite so much as I enjoyed that time he slagged off the hosts while commenting on Eurovision in Denmark, and they invaded his cubicle and glitterbombed him, and he was heard to say, quietly and forlornly, “But it’s gone in my wine.”