Moments of truth: telling it like it is on The Jeremy Kyle Show

Abstract

As Chapter 1 explains, contributions to this book are interested in exploring a discursive, rather than a generic, approach to understanding reality television. This chapter, which focuses on a UK talk show, is no exception. For if, as was common in its early years, reality TV is analysed generically as ‘factual television’ (Hill 2005) using ‘post-documentary’ formats (Corner 2000) to construct dramatic scenarios taken from raw recorded footage (law enforcement, emergency services) or unpredictable interactions in confined situations (Survivor, Big Brother), then the talk show, studio-based and substantially pre-scripted, might not fit the bill. In the generic analysis, the emphasis was on new forms of access to ‘the real’ afforded by new technologies of recording and surveillance. However, if reality TV is defined as an ‘order of discourse’ (Chapter 1) and if that discourse is understood to produce and not merely reflect the ‘reality’ it depicts, then perhaps a talk show can be analysed as one particular way of constructing a version of that ‘reality’. In Foucaultian terms, reality TV might be understood as a discursive formation; as a set of institutional practices that construct their objects, in relations of power, and according to specific ‘regimes of truth’ (see Dovey 2000). That is the analytic approach taken in this chapter: it aims to show how one talk show inhabits a broad discursive formation that defines ‘reality’ on television, and how it reproduces a distinctive version of ‘truth’.