Everyone knows about The Jeremy Kyle Show. ITV’s daytime programme was subject to criticism for years, levelled at its model of turning vulnerable people’s lowest moments into light entertainment—but it wasn’t until the death of sixty-three-year-old Steve Dymond, who took his own life after appearing on the show and ‘failing’ one of its notorious (and unreliable) lie detector tests, that Jeremy Kyle was finally taken off air. Its last episode was broadcast on 10 May 2019.

The programme has recently found itself under new scrutiny following the release of two-part Channel 4 documentary The Jeremy Kyle Show: Death On Daytime. The documentary pulls no punches in its criticism, detailing how Jeremy Kyle staff were trained to agitate guests before they appeared on air, to rile them up to the extent that Manchester district judge Alan Berg famously described the programme as a ‘human form of bear baiting’. But Death on Daytime also took care to recognise the social elements of Jeremy Kyle’s popularity and salience. After all, The Jeremy Kyle Show wasn’t just shock TV, it was also a product of its historical and political context—specifically, of neoliberalism.

The story of The Jeremy Kyle Show is at least in part the story of how neoliberalism transformed economic, political, and cultural life of Britain. Where neoliberalism is commonly equated with market fundamentalism or opposition to state intervention, as Bruno Amable argues, it should also be understood as an ideological project dedicated to the creation of a society of self-reliant individuals predicated on competition. This was the end served by the policies of the Thatcher government, from breaking the unions to Right to Buy.

Jeremy Kyle did not debut until 2005, of course, long after Thatcher had left office and seven years into Tony Blair’s New Labour government. But New Labour was no less committed to society’s neoliberal reorientation, albeit with the sharper corners of Thatcherism blunted.

Blair’s proclamations that the class-based antagonisms of the twentieth century were over—that we were ‘all middle-class now’—were not reflected in reality. In Steal as Much as You Can: How to Win the Culture Wars in an Age of Austerity, Nathalie Olah argues that though New Labour’s reforms helped marginalised and working-class children attain academic educations that may not have otherwise been available to them, they were implemented under the expectation that through education, those kids would internalise and adopt the ‘aspirational’ values of the bourgeoisie. The ‘aspirational’ working class, who sought to better their material position and provide a proper education for their children, became a common trope of the Blair years—as did their counterpart, the so-called ‘underclass’, who by contrast were seen to have chosen their role as Britain’s jobless, criminal social outcasts.

It is no coincidence that alongside the aforementioned social reforms, Blair’s government expanded the state’s carceral powers through the introduction of the Antisocial Behavior Order (ASBO) in 1998. If they wanted a place in this ‘classless’ Britain, the working class had to become accomplices in their own erasure. Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t were fair game.

This, then, was the cultural milieu into which The Jeremy Kyle Show was born, and it was hardly alone. The archetypes of the underclass like the chav and the benefit scrounger were mainstays of noughties popular culture, whether deployed by furious broadsheet columnists to bemoan the moral decline of British society or by programmes like Little Britain or The Catherine Tate Show for cheap laughs. Among them, however, The Jeremy Kyle Show stands out as both uniquely moralistic and uniquely confrontational.

There was a sense of ritual to episodes of The Jeremy Kyle Show, from the back-and-forth between furious feuding parties to the lie detector test, the ultimate arbiter of truth, to Jeremy himself, who would assume the role of stern disciplinarian, offering a sympathetic ear to those guests deemed deserving and berating and lecturing those who were not: ‘Why don’t you get off your arse and go get a job?’

Watching old clips, I’m reminded of family stories of my four-times great grandfather walking from Tadcaster to York to see hangings in the early 1800s. For him, public executions were an event to look forward to, but these rituals also served the institutional purpose of visibly affirming the strength of the crown and its power over those it deemed guilty. Jeremy Kyle is obviously no public execution, but as a piece of popular entertainment it similarly reinforced viewers’ belief in the fundamental justice of the new neoliberal morality. That’s not to say this was a conscious endeavor on the part of the show’s creators, who likely just knew they had hit on a formula for captivating TV—but the show passively demanded certain values of its viewers, above all belief in personal responsibility for one’s circumstances. Systemic problems, in the Jeremy Kyle universe, did not exist: it was the guests’ responsibility to sort their lives out.

The installation of this ideology would soon prove useful to a new generation of Conservatives, who returned to power in 2010 and wasted no time implementing punitive austerity measures under the guise of ‘balancing the budget’. Of these measures, the reforms to welfare proved particularly cruel, often requiring claimants to undergo humiliating and discriminatory work capability assessments that could ultimately push them toward suicide. All the while, Jeremy Kyle and its cultural type primed the country to accept such reforms as just.

It would be impossible to quantify the show’s lasting impact. For people directly affected, like the family of Steve Dymond, the damage is irreparable. Kyle himself has since reprised his old role as a radio presenter, announcing his debut last year by whingeing in an interview with Mike Graham that he had been ‘cancelled’. He’ll be OK: his ilk always are. What about the rest of us?

In recent years, the collective hostility towards benefit claimants has softened somewhat. Ten years after the Cameron government came to power, the 2020 British Social Attitudes Survey found that support for benefits among Britons was at its highest in twenty years. As the outrage at the government’s refusal to implement free school meals at the height of the pandemic illustrates, public sentiment can still be mobilised in favor of Britain’s dispossessed, and with powerful effect.

But it would be a mistake to assume we have moved on from The Jeremy Kyle Show. At the time of writing, Britain faces an unprecedented cost of living crisis that looks set to impoverish millions. The government’s response has been to announce piecemeal measures meaningless to those hardest hit. In this context, it would be all too easy for the Tories and their apologists to revert to the benefits scrounger archetype to blame the poor and marginalised for the new depths of immiseration they face, and to distract from the state’s failure to help. Jeremy Kyle might have faced its reckoning—but the conditions that birthed it have yet to face theirs.