By Neil Patrick
Technology is not a panacea; who uses it for what end is what matters.
Two stories generated headlines in the UK media this week. Both involved the careers of British men who pursued entirely different paths to reaching their more or less simultaneous denouement.
One was a media celebrity and recognisable face to millions. The other virtually unknown and unlikely to recognised by anyone outside his immediate circle. The former was vilified; the latter applauded.
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| Jeremy Kyle at Radio Festival 2010 Photo Credit: James Cridland |
The first is Jeremy Kyle. A sort of UK version of Jerry Springer. I say ‘sort of’ because while both used a similar show format, in comparison to Springer, Kyle comes off poorly.
"Jerry Springer was confrontational but had a charm to him that diffused some criticism," said TV commentator Cameron Yarde Jnr. "He was witty but never came across as sneering."
Kyle’s show was axed this week after it emerged that a show guest, Steve Dymond had committed suicide following his appearance when he failed a lie detector test. Today it’s being reported that two more deaths are being linked to his show.
Lie detector technology is old and crude. It’s cod-science. It can be gamed and even experts confess it's little more reliable than guessing. But its aura of science leads the public to believe it's infallible, when in fact it depends entirely on who is using it and for what purpose. When that purpose is sensationalism, it’s the devil’s own device.
Kyle’s show ran for fourteen years on ITV where he was both ringmaster and provocateur in a show which a judge once described as ‘human bear-baiting.’ District Judge Alan Berg made this comment in 2007 while sentencing one of the show's guests, who’d head-butted his love rival during filming.
Judges are not prone to exaggeration. Kyle’s show involved ‘guests’ who he’d bring on to his show to disclose their deepest and most troubling personal problems. The proposition to them was that Kyle would in some way ease their suffering and help resolve their problems.
Any normal person would be deeply dubious that appearing on national TV in front of a studio audience who regard you as scum could under any circumstances be genuinely helpful.
But these people are not normal. They exist in an impoverished parallel universe. They are educationally, economically and socially the least well-functioning members of society.
Guests would be chosen and then persuaded to appear on the basis of the shock value of their predicaments. Domestic abuse, gambling, drug and alcohol addiction, paternity, infidelity, incest, rape; all were grist to Kyle’s mill. The more sordid the better.
On The Jeremy Kyle Show, the host was "as confrontational as the audience". Kyle would adopt a scarcely merited position of moral superiority, switching between compassion and hostility as a pseudo-counsellor.
His program was carefully calculated to extract the ugliest and most shocking details of the lives of Britain’s underclass. And worse, to manipulate and goad them towards the inevitably violent outbursts which had to be restrained by the burly security types hovering sidestage.
The show used every lever available to find and persuade those in torment to air their darkest secrets and grievances to the nation. This would be traumatic enough in private counselling, but Kyle used a contrived environment calculated to extract maximum sensationalism for his sneering and jeering audience.
These lives are tragic enough without being used to generate ad revenue through the million or so daily viewers the show averaged. But there’s a market value to one million bored people with nothing better to do than delight in the life traumas of others. If any reality TV show revealed the ugly face of naked media capitalism, this was it.
If this proves to be Kyle’s career terminus then I’d suggest it could have been foreseen. We can tell a lot about a person from their CV.
Born in 1965, from 1986 to 1995, Kyle worked as a life insurance salesman, recruitment consultant, and radio advertising salesman before beginning his broadcasting career as a radio presenter in 1996.
These first nine years of his career were working in jobs which the goal was the achievement of sales targets. People are merely pawns to enable the sale. And they are controlled and manipulated with one goal only – making money from them.
Kyle’s show took this ideology (if it deserves such a title) to the big stage of national TV. And for years, no-one at ITV was in the slightest bit troubled by the dubious morality of the venture. Big ad revenues are a powerful way to diminish moral scruples after all.
I’m glad to see this monstrosity of television terminated, but beyond sad that it required someone’s death to bring it about.
But to end on a happier note, we should look at the other career story.
Julian Richer founded a business selling hi-fi in the 1970s. Today Richer Sounds has branches nationwide and around 500 employees.
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| Richer Sounds branch London Bridge Photo credit: Richer Sounds |
This week Richer, now aged 60, announced he would commence the transfer of ownership of his business to his employees. He put 60% of his shares in trust for this, as well as making a bonus payment of £1,000 for every year of work to each employee. The average staff bonus would be £8,000, but since many staff have worked there for 30 or more years, some will receive much more.
Julian Richer is the sort of entrepreneur and capitalist we need a lot more of today. And as a long-standing if infrequent customer of his shops, I have nothing but praise for the customer experience he and his people provide. If I have a retail hero, Julian Richer is it.
The way he treats his staff shows in surveys which report that 95% of them love working for him. His approach translates into tangible results: In 2012, his 53 stores produced profits of £6.9m from sales of £144.3m. No mean feat in an economy full of high street retail failure and depressed consumer spending.
Over four decades he has championed providing secure, well-paid jobs because he believes a happy workforce is key to business success. At a time when zero-hours contracts are blighting the labour market, he has been rewarded with loyalty from staff who worship him.
Just like Kyle, Richer’s career is a product of who he is and what he believes in.
When he was 14, during the energy crisis, he bought a case of candles for £3 and sold it for £15. That was followed by second-hand hi-fi equipment – he would do up turntables and sell them. By the time he was 17, he had three people working for him.
At 19, he opened his first Richer Sounds shop at London Bridge. He is devoted to what he calls "the biz". His parents worked for Marks & Spencer – a firm which famously also treated its staff well.
Richer has many parallel and philanthropic interests. He was the first patron of The Big Issue Foundation and an early director of the Prince of Wales's Duchy Originals. He's the founder of Acts 435, a charity launched by Archbishop John Sentamu to help those in need, and ASB Help, a charity to help the victims of antisocial behaviour.
"The biz" is his life's work and he sees it as only natural that those who have contributed to his company's success, the staff, should inherit it.
I don't think we should make the contrast between Jeremy Kyle and Julian Richer a binary one. Kyle is not an inherently bad person. He just made some bad judgements and probably lost sight that the net benevolence of his work was at best neutral and at worst negative. He possibly genuinely believed that he was doing good work, and chose not to reflect too hard on the basic morality of his business model.
Technology is inherently neither good nor bad. It's morally neutral, therefore, it demands that we provide the moral compass for it. Sound human judgement is needed to provide this.
Creators and users and their motives are what really matter. Perhaps we should care a little less about technological progress and a lot more about moral progress.
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