Vanessa Feltz has blasted "domineering and condemnatory" Jeremy Kyle in the wake of the death of a former guest.
The 57-year-old broadcaster has slammed the presenter’s self-titled show – which has now been axed by ITV following the death of Steve Dymond – for not being "civil" and "utterly smashing" those who appeared to discuss their personal problems.
She told BBC Radio 4: "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.
"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. He has certainly riled and inflamed his guests and he’s flourished on the back of that."
Ahead of ITV’s announcement that the programme is being taken off air for good, Vanessa spoke about how she believes audiences have "run out of time and patience" for the show.
She added: "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.
"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."
The presenter previously had her own chat show, ‘Vanessa’, and insisted her programme – which ran from 1994 to 1998 – had a very different ethos because she wanted the guests to feel "better" about themselves.
She said: "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.
"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."
Vanessa Feltz slams Jeremy Kyle
