Trailer trash telling the truth on the Kyle telly

TV Watch with Dave O’Connell

How unfortunate do you have to be that – the one time you tune into the Jeremy Kyle Show – both the husband and wife pass the lie detector test?

He thought she was cheating on him – and somehow managed to convince himself that he even recorded her in flagrante – so he packed his bags and moved out on his wife and kids.

She was convinced that he was at it like an energetic rabbit in his new bedsit – and thus this husband and wife of 25 years standing decided that the best place to sort all of this out would be in front of the nation and, indeed, the self-styled straightest talking man on the box.

Jeremy Kyle is the sort of bloke you’d move house to avoid having as a neighbour, because rarely has so many words been bestowed on a man with so little use for them.

And yet the Jeremy Kyle Show is extremely popular among those who find themselves in front of the telly in the middle of the day.

Granted, you’re not exactly spoilt for choice at ten or eleven in the morning.

Chances are you’ve already seen the Homes Under the Hammer or the Four in a Bed or the Ready Steady Cook repeat, or you simply couldn’t give a toss about Jamie’s Fifteen Minute Dinners.

So if you surf the channels and you come across a skinhead roaring about his cheating, eighteen stone wife who never loved him, it’s like watching a car crash unfolding before your eyes.

Better still when it’s two raging women dragging each others’ hair out by its peroxide roots while some little weed of a man – the one they’re fighting over – cowers behind the couch.

The premise is a simple one; you get a couple with a big bone to pick – mother/daughter, husband/wife, best friends with one girl between them – and one by one, you introduce the protagonists to the audience.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.