This Jeremy Kyle Chap

I’ve been hearing rather a lot about him recently. Apparently, he hosts a daytime TV show for people that is like a new human form of bear baiting. Well, being partial to a little of that myself, I casually tuned in (as you do) and very nearly tuned right back out again. However my butler passed me the smelling salts, I steeled myself and carried right on watching. I rang the Queen and asked her if she would be prepared to give me the George Cross for this outstanding act of bravery. She thought about it for a while and then told me to bog off.

To begin with our ‘Jezza‘ presided over the jobless, the feckless, the reckless, the talentless, the tedious, feeding off their inadequacy – smug, supercilious and sneering at the centre of the stage. People have compared him to an American talk show host called Jerry Springer. There is, however, one crucial difference: unlike Kyle, Springer does not pretend to be some well-intentioned social worker out to save the world. Springer knows what he is providing: entertainment and nothing more and he is quite prepared to admit it.

Halfway through Kyle’s minions led a mother and her bulimic daughter onto the stage. The solution they offered to this girl’s mountain of ‘issues’ was to parade a group of real anorectics before her. Then Graham, the show’s psychologist (and now, apparently, ED Specialist) told her that in order to ‘shock her into recovery’ the ‘team’ would take her to a clinic where she could see end-stage anorectics ‘in the flesh.’ The girl on the stage switched off at this point. There was a ‘the lights are on but there’s no one home’ look on her face. What Kyle and his sidekick Graham didn’t seem to realize was that the message they were sending out was not the message that was being received. In her own mind she wasn’t as thin as the other young women being paraded before her were because she was weak. She was just a ‘wannabe’ and I bet she left that show determined that she wouldn’t be one of those for much longer. Such is the twisted thought process of the anorectic. What part of the phrase ‘distorted perception’ doesn’t he understand? Why does Graham, the psychologist seem unfamiliar with the concept of ‘triggering‘? The anorectic’s denial of nourishment is born out of a need for control, about the need for self sufficiency. ‘The fashion industry; and ‘the desire to be glamorous’ do play a role in this but those issues are not at the core of the illness.

As I’m a dedicated follower of fashion I’ll say what many others have elsewhere: that guy should not be allowed within a million miles of anyone remotely vulnerable. Halfway though the show he threw up his hands and said ‘I just don’t get it.’

Well, he got that bit right. Dead right.

Oh, and leave it to a judge to state the freaking obvious.

 

Tags: fashion, George Cross, Jerry Springer, Queen, Springer, Springer Science+Business Media, Television, United States