Vanessa Feltz slams ‘pulverising, snarling’ Jeremy Kyle and calls for show ban

Vanessa Feltz has slammed Jeremy Kyle's presenting techniques and says it's a miracle a tragedy hasn't happened sooner.

Speaking after the suspected suicide of Jeremy Kyle Show guest, Steve Dymond, she laid into fellow TV host Jeremy, 53, accusing him of "pulverising and judging, shouting and generally scorning people in this very public arena."

"I think people had watched his personality… and have felt may be it wasn't healthy, it wasn't civil, it wasn't in any way the sorts of things that people feel comfortable watching and the net effect of utterly smashing someone to smithereens in public can't be to make them feel great about themselves," Vanessa, 57, told Radio 4 today.

"I think the success of The Jeremy Kyle show really has been predicated on the snarling and the shouting and the attacking and the security guards and also Jeremy Kyle's pugilistic, argumentative, very often hectoring and often entirely domineering and condemnatory personality," she continued.

"He has certainly riled and inflamed his guests and he's flourished on the back of that."

Digger driver Steve, 62, is believed to have taken his own life just days filming the ITV show, with landlady Shelly claiming he felt 'humiliated and traumatised'.

She discovered Steven's body in his room last Thursday, and says ITV execs flooded to her address in Portsmouth on Saturday after she reported his death.

According to Shelly, 55, he was 'sobbing and distraught' when he returned from filming on May 2 after failing a lie-detector test about whether he had cheated on his on-off girlfriend, Jane Callaghan.

After learning of his death, the channel pulled Monday's scheduled broadcast of the episode, suspended filming of the show and removed all past episodes from the ITV Hub.

Vanessa now believes audiences have "run out of time a patience" for the genre, and suggests it should be cancelled for good.

"They've just about had enough of seeing that kind of thumb of human misery. It's unedifying. It's distressing and maybe people have just had enough. Maybe this is the right time to pull the plug," she continued.

"I think that most people who watch the Jeremy Kyle show feel it's surprising that something as tragic as somebody taking a life hadn't happened before this."

Referencing her own chat show Vanessa, which ran from 1994 to 1998, she argued the point was to make guests feel better, not worse.

"When my show started in 1994 the attitude to mental health and the perspective on mental health was very, very different from the attitude today, also the atmosphere on the show was very different," she said.

"So it wasn't confrontational. It was much more exploratory 'Why did you do that? How come you made that choice? What led you to run away with your husband's wife? Why did you decide to cop off with the best man at your daughter's wedding?

"It was hoped I think that the participants would feel better rather than worse at the end of the show.

"That they would feel validated,seen, heard, supported by me, supported by the audience and would all in all feel they had done a good thing by taking part in the show rather than the opposite."

Recalling how she went to watch Jerry Springer on his show, she said it was 'interesting' to see how he stood off to the side of the room and shrugged 'almost helplessly' to what people were saying.

She added: "…but certainly not to do what Jeremy Kyle might do and intervene
to make things worse.

"Then at the end of the show you would have a few words of wisdom. Words of Chairman Jerry and they were always placatory – the sort of thing you might read on a tea towel."

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