Bring an end to TV’s theatre of cruelty

ITV has been urged to permanently pull the Jeremy Kyle Show after a guest who failed a lie-detector test on the programme killed himself. This poverty porn founded on the exploitation of the powerless and the vulnerable should have been cancelled long before now.

It is not entertainment to make a public spectacle of the social ills which come with being skint and disempowered.

Those like Steve Dymond, who took his own life, appeared on the programme out of desperation, in some vain and misguided hope it would provide answers to their problems.

Kyle is an arrogant, odious bully, who threw people in grinding despair into the public stocks for the sole purpose of filling his own pockets.

Last year, Mark Sinclair, who had post traumatic stress disorder, died of a drug overdose three months after appearing on the show.

Trotting out damaged human beings, as though they are freaks in a circus, is intolerable and has no place in a society which is supposed to be progressing in its attitudes surrounding mental illness.