The trouble with having very little is the perception that you can be easily bought. Many participants on The Jeremy Kyle Show, on being asked why they went on, said that they had never stayed in a hotel before. The seductive triad of an all-expenses-paid trip, free booze and 15 minutes of fame is a far cry from an everyday life that is scarcely examined.
Over the past week, my inbox has been packed with horror stories about the machinations of The Jeremy Kyle Show, with claims that members of the production team infiltrated 12-step programmes, transgender support groups and other havens for various fragments of vulnerability. The emerging pattern from these stories is this: one member joins the group to identify potential guests and gains their trust. Time passes, usually a few weeks, and they offer a “solution” to their conflicts, internal or external. The show was rarely mentioned until a few days before filming the accounts suggest. If true, in any other level of society, we would see this for what it is: grooming and manipulation. All in the name of the 9.25am entertainment slot.
I am sure, as with the phone-hacking scandal and other examples of systemic abuses of power and control in the media, that some will use the line of “one or two bad apples”, but the stories I have received span years and unless they are all from particularly sophisticated fake “sock accounts” playing rather long games, none of the senders appears to know each other.
The death of Steven Dymond should be the watershed moment for the British media to pause and reflect on how they portray the working class.
Last week on Twitter, a journalist asked what the difference was between middle-class Instagrammers “talking about their problems” and Jeremy Kyle’s guests airing theirs. The difference is that the former are their own editors with control of their own publishing platform. They choose their captions, their framing and they release one single, carefully curated image. Nobody is there in the wings screaming obscenities at them. There is no live baiting, no tempers running high, no jeering Machiavellian caricature – there are, quite frankly, no similarities at all.
Being on television is sold to us as some kind of ideal, a lie that impresses from a young age. My son, who is nine, tells me that when he grows up he wants to be a scientist. Most of his peers want to be “on television”. He has sat in green rooms with me at ungodly hours in the morning, spent five hours travelling for a six-minute slot on the box and has, thankfully, absolutely no desire to be a part of that world, having seen it from the inside.
What he hasn’t seen is me sobbing at my desk as the hate mail pours in for having my tattoos out on a cooking segment on television or the endless, bitter online debate about whether I am too working class to be an expert in anything or too middle class to talk about poverty. I straddle a line that seems to make almost everyone uncomfortable – I have known true, desperate, awful hardship and I write books and, for some, apparently, the two are impossible to reconcile.
We had very little as children, but my mum taught me and my brother to read and write at the small breakfast table long before we started school. And when, in 2013, I was invited to be on television to talk about how making meals from a food-bank parcel had led to a book deal, I didn’t have any PR advice or advocacy.
I naively put a suit jacket on, thinking I should dress like I was going for a job interview, and suppressed my Essex accent, because I wanted people to like me. It backfired and I received floods of abuse from people who assumed I was a well-off Conservative plant trying to lecture “the poor” on how benefits were enough to live on. I had borrowed the train fare to get there, borrowed the jacket and left two sizes smaller than I had arrived.
I refuse, now, to do engineered morning television debates. There is mileage in it, if you are willing to form opinions that you scarcely believe, if all you really want is to be a “personality”. But I’m afraid I have rather more to be getting on with, like actually working with children’s centres and food banks, with disenfranchised, hungry, desperate people trying to cobble together meals to feed themselves and their families with a paltry, delayed or dented benefit cheque.
I truly hope that this is the moment that working-class representation on television shifts – from the tired tropes of fecklessness and drudgery to the rich tapestry of community, relationships, challenges overcome. The time for previously unheard voices is now – Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn, Kit de Waal’s anthology Common People, Darren “Loki” McGarvey’s Poverty Safari, to name a few writers and their books, and film-maker Daisy-May Hudson. Our experiences of life are frustrating, devastating, hilarious and complex, exactly the kind of material that primetime television might do very well out of, if only it gave us half a chance to tell our own stories, instead of casting us as characters in a Punch and Judy drama to line their own pockets.
The supporters of Kyle will argue that the people featured had an opportunity to be heard in a society that often ignores their voices. And in some cases that may well be true. But we can do better than offer a few cans of beer and a night away in return for a person’s dignity and a few hundred thousand viewers, whether that’s Kyle or Love Island, Benefits Street or any of the rest of it. Reality TV is cheap to make, but the lives that can be destroyed by it are priceless. We need to do better.