Class, trust and confessional media in Austerity Britain

Abstract

This article situates The Jeremy Kyle Show, a television talk show broadcast in the United Kingdom, in wider narratives of austerity politics in order to explore the reinforcement and legitimation through reality television of neoliberal measures for economic crisis management. In the first section, it is argued that technologies of confession – lie detectors, paternity tests, drug testing – are used on guests who are deemed, by virtue of class position, to be untrustworthy, undermining the very basis of therapeutic talk by deferring to scientific measurement of the body in order to derive truths. In the second section, it is argued that this measurement does not simply identify bodily truths but locates bodies that lack the discipline to contribute efficiently to the austerity agenda, providing a platform for shaming that amounts to an attack on the welfare state. This article introduces austerity television, and the austerity realism that it promotes, as an important area of study in the humanities and social sciences.