Low Class versus No Class - Jeremy Kyle and Felix TV

You know, it amazes me sometimes, the levels of objectionable shit I see every day without feeling the need to write about it here. The Christian Union’s latest poster, for instance, which advertised with glee a speaker who is said to “put the fear of God up atheists”, using the same reassuring tones that Crusades-era religious believers were so good at employing. And yet – no column on it. I just couldn’t summon the will to invent new defecation-based swears that adequately captured the barrel-scraping depths to which those shit-gargling evangelists had stooped. Maybe, I thought, I was getting old. I was mellowing.

Then a friend of mine forwarded a link to a Felix article. And after I’d blacked out with incandescent rage and laid waste to a small segment of West Kensington, I found myself with a desire to write. The article in question features in last week’s Felix, discussing the merits of the Jeremy Kyle show with all the thoughtfulness and understanding of a Tory social policy.

As a piece of writing, it makes about as much sense as the opinions it clumsily attempts to shit out onto the page. Starting off appearing to criticise the much-maligned talk show for the way it treats its guests and so on, by the end of the article the author is praising it for being such. “It may well be ‘human bear-baiting’”, he writes, barely visible on top of his stack of high horses, “but to be honest it’s funnier than a penguin playing a banjo.” Well, as long as it’s funny.

It’s probably worth mentioning that the Jeremy Kyle show is not the best television show around. Remember, though, that the production team heavily cherrypick their guests to maximise whatever effect they’re going for that week. The one solitary piece of factual information in the Felix article explained how some episodes focus on sob stories, others attempting to ‘resolve’ conflict - generally through poking the guests until one of them snaps on camera. Once you’ve got the right guests, the rest is left up to Jeremy himself, a man with slightly less charisma than a dead monitor lizard, and equally cold-blooded.

Don’t be fooled by the fact that the show appears to appeal to people ‘below you’, though. The entire show is designed to make you think it’s targeting someone less classy than you. That’s the show’s selling point: that when you watch it, you get to feel superior. Even the Felix article manages to deduce this with the limited number of brain cells seemingly available to the author, noting in conclusion that “it does wonders for your ego to know that you will never be as shit a person as they are”, although this fact is noted without the appropriate level of irony.

It’s no surprise though. Most of this article was written on autopilot, spewing out lines repeated so often they’ve lost all meaning. It’s like Racist Fuckwit Bingo. “Leeching off the government.” Tick. “Too damn lazy to get a job.” Tick. “They need educating”. House! What do I win, George? Oh, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the foundation of equality that modern society is built on. Hooray!

I’m tired. I’m tired of bullshit like this, and having to excuse my own fucking institution when talking to other people. That friend that sent me the article? He goes to Aberdeen University. The only reason he saw this article was because it got linked to on a major Internet forum that decried it as horrific and insulting - which it is. While it thrills me to have something to be so riled by, and it pleases me that Felix can still print student opinion no matter how moronic, I think it’s time for some of us to take a step back and actually re-examine the world we’re living in.

I don’t expect people who are educated enough to study at Imperial, and interested enough to sign up for a course based on science, reason and intellect, to be writing in their student paper espousing the merits of inequality and holier-than-thou fuckwittery. I know I detest almost every single one of you fuckers, but I do that anyway. That’s a baseline. You don’t have to aspire towards that goal by being the biggest horse cock you can possibly be. So maybe next week we could have a TV section about actual television, and I’ll try and have a comment column about how funny it is when geologists pretend they’re actually doing science. That way, no-one has to be sterilised.