And Yet, We Watch: Blog by Brontë Schiltz

In 2019, ITV axed long-running ‘conflict resolution’ reality programme The Jeremy Kyle Show in response to the suicide of Steve Dymond following his participation on the programme. He was one of 40 people to have died by suicide following involvement in reality television, including five other attempted and completed suicides relating to The Jeremy Kyle Show. Details later emerged of extremely unethical production practices on the set of the programme. These included staff being forced to work illegally long shifts, vulnerable people being pressured into agreeing to participate in the programme, producers encouraging participants to consume alcohol and purchase illegal substances before recording, and crew members using techniques such as isolation and verbal antagonism to provoke emotional outbursts once participants were on stage. Producers also admitted to telling participants that they were in competition, and that only those who gave the most dramatic performance would be given follow-up support – the very reason that many people wanted to participate.

In 2024, during a prolonged inquest, ITV released the unaired footage from Dymond’s appearance on the programme. It makes for harrowing watching – after the results of a lie detector test that Dymond requested to prove that he had not been unfaithful to his fiancé, Jane Callaghan, suggest that he answered the questions dishonestly, he begs her to believe his version of events. Kyle responds emotionlessly: ‘Don’t start crying, mate. The hardest part of my job is, I’m paid to read it out. You asked us to do that. Why would you fail?’ He later reiterates that Dymond ‘categorically failed’ the test, and states that the production team ‘stand 100% by that’. Behind-the-scenes footage also shows the polygraph examiner who conducted the test telling Dymond that it is being filmed ‘just to verify that we’ve treated you fairly … and that the test has been done correctly,’ then claiming that the test is ‘between 93 and 95%’ accurate. In fact, experts estimate the accuracy rate at around 61% – a statistic that emerged from research conducted in 1997, eight years before the programme first aired. 

In conjuring discourses of labour – he is just doing his job, what he has been paid to do – Kyle obscures the deliberate exploitation and manipulation that he and his team subjected participants to, offering lie detector tests, rehabilitation and therapy to impoverished, vulnerable people who lacked recourse to more reliable and ethical forms of justice and support.

This should have come as no surprise. In 1997, a British producer, Charlie Parsons, developed Expedition Robinson, a reality programme in which sixteen people had to fend for themselves on an island while eliminating each other. He sold the format to Sweden’s STRIX Television, who began production in 2011. The first contestant to be eliminated was Sinisa Savija, a 34-year-old refugee from the former Yugoslavia. Four weeks later – before the programme had even gone to air – he stepped in front of a high-speed train. He left no account of his decision to end his life, but his wife claimed that he ‘became deeply depressed and agonised’ following his eviction and that he ‘felt degraded as a person and didn’t see any meaning in life’. Despite this, CBS bought the concept. This became Survivor, one of the most popular reality programmes of all time. Meanwhile, while ITV cancelled The Jeremy Kyle Show following public outcry, they continue to produce competitive dating show Love Island despite the suicides of former contestants Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis, broadcasting the fifth series across June and July 2019 – after the widely reported deaths of Dymond, Gradon and Thalassitis – to the programme’s highest ever ratings.

Fascinatingly, in Channel 4’s 2022 documentary Jeremy Kyle Show: Death on Daytime, an anonymous camera operator who had worked on the programme drew on distinctly Gothic language in describing his experience. He likened the set to a haunted house – ‘the horrors that were being committed in the bowels of that building ... can never be scrubbed from those walls, ever’ – and the programme’s production and consumption to cannibalism – ‘this is a production line, this is a factory... You feed emotionally vulnerable people in the one end... it’s just like a meat-processing plant.’ The Gothic, it seems, provides the perfect vehicle through which to articulate these very real horrors. Fittingly, screenwriters have repeatedly drawn on the Gothic, horror and science fiction to articulate fears about the potential of reality television production to exploit vulnerable people, from Nigel Kneale’s 1968 dystopian drama The Year of the Sex Olympics to Russell T. Davies’ 2005 Doctor Who episode ‘Bad Wolf’, Charlie Brooker’s 2008 miniseries Dead Set and Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s 2015 Inside No. 9 episode ‘Séance Time’. But depictions of the horrors of reality television remain limited in British literature.

In ‘The Wild Hunt’, the story that I wrote for Monster Capital, I meld mythology with Marxist theory – including the work of Mark Fisher, who inspired this collection, alongside Helen Wood and Beverly Skeggs’ Reality Television and Class and David McNally’s Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism – to draw out this quotidian, spectacular monstrosity. After Pete wakes on his forty-fifth birthday, crying uncontrollably for no discernible reason, his life spirals rapidly downwards. He eventually finds solace in The Worst of Us, a melodramatic reality programme presented by the charismatic Martin Smile. But all is not as it seems.

In 2009, Lane Wallace reported on the use by reality television producers of recognised torture methods, ‘including sleep deprivation, isolation, taunting, food deprivation, and pushing of alcohol consumption’ – all of which featured in the production of The Jeremy Kyle Show. ‘And yet,’ she noted, ‘like the Romans of old, we cheer. We laugh. We watch.’ Reality television is often marketed as a form of escapism from the demands of life under capitalism, of relaxation after a long working day. But after almost thirty years of driving vulnerable participants to suicide, it demands reassessment. If we are what we watch, then what kind of monster does reality television consumption make of us?

You can find Brontë's story ‘The Wild Hunt’ in our new horror anthology based on the work of Mark Fisher: Monster Capital.

Brontë Schiltz is a journalist with The Big Issue and Big Issue North, a freelance contributor to Horrified Magazine, and a PhD candidate with the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at MMU where she researches the Televisual Gothic (horror on and about TV). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Lotuseater Magazine, Olney Magazine, The First Line, Hungry Ghost Magazine and The Book of Manchester (Comma, 2024).