THE JERRY SPRINGER SHOW: FIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION...! BY SANDRA HARRIS.
JERRY
SPRINGER: FIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION!
BY SANDRA
HARRIS. ©
‘Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry…!’
I remember one time late in the ‘Nineties, my then boyfriend
said to me: ‘You’ll never believe what I saw on television last night. It was
this American talk show, right, but the guests were knocking seven bells out of
each other and the audience members were going wild, meanwhile, the host was
just standing there grinning and letting it all happen…! You have to
watch this with me when it’s on again!’
And of course I did, and of course the programme was the
Jerry Springer Show, and the laid-back host who fiddled while Rome burned was
the eponymous Jerry Springer, the man who more or less single-handedly invented
what we now call ‘trash TV.’ This was TV that concentrated on the more
controversial or sensationalist topics out there rather than the boring or
sensible ones, and, from 1991 to 2018, Jerry Springer was the undisputed king
of trash TV.
The guests were often of the ‘poor white trash’ variety, the
kind who lived in trailer parks and had poorly-paying jobs or no jobs at all,
and whose children ran amok or raised themselves while their parents were gloriously
enmeshed in their narrow world of cheatin,’ beatin’ and eatin’ fast food in
front of the television, from which they gleaned the bulk of the information they
needed to make it through life.
A two-part documentary has just dropped on Netflix entitled JERRY
SPRINGER: FIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION! (2025). It tells the story of the show from
the point of view of some of the folks who worked on it back in the day,
including Richard Dominick the director-producer and researcher Tobias Yoshimura.
The pressure to come up with ideas and guests for four shows
a week was immense, but the viewer ratings were through the roof and, when they
finally beat even Oprah Winfrey, the queen of daytime talk shows, in these ratings
wars, it just confirmed what all of them had known all along . . . they were
sitting on a little goldmine with this Jerry Springer Show of theirs . . .
There are a ton of reminders in the documentary about some of
the more memorable shows aired over the years, including one about
relationships so bizarre they had to be kept secret by the people in them. They
had this guy sitting on the stage, calm as you like, waiting for his secret ‘wife’
to be revealed. ‘Bring on the wife!’ cries Jerry excitedly, and out
comes an attractive young woman . . . leading an adorable Shetland pony by the
neck . . .
The audience goes wild. I mean, they go mental. That’s
because, as if you hadn’t already guessed, it’s the pony that’s the wife. In
this episode entitled, ‘I married a horse,’ Jerry asks the man, who’s
sitting on stage as comfortable as anything, ‘if this horse is your wife,
then do you have sexual intercourse with this horse?’ And the guest
answers, ‘Well, ah guess, yeah.’
The poor horsey, recognising its owner and not knowing any
better, proceeds to lick his owner’s face . . . and the man licks back. The audience
makes vomiting noises. The show gets a rap on the knuckles for featuring
bestiality, but does anyone think to report the horse owner to the ASPCA for
abusing an animal?
Then there were the shows featuring members of the racist
organisation, the Ku Klux Klan. These were always hugely popular, as the
audience loved to boo and hiss at the guests just as if they were at the
pantomime. The one where representatives of the Jewish Defence League rushed
out on stage and started whaling on the ones in bedsheets was pure television
gold.
Accusations of ‘staging’ and ‘scripting’ were levelled
against the show. Did the producers encourage the guests to beat each other up
because it sent the ratings skyrocketing? Did they tell the guests what to say
and how to behave? Did they try to rile them up before the show and give them
alcohol to drink so they’d go out on stage all pumped up and ready to kick ass?
Jerry and the show’s producers said no, of course we don’t do anything like
that, but I don’t know . . .
I loved the episodes where folks came on the show to reveal a
‘secret’ to their loved ones, usually that they were cheating, they were pregnant by
someone else or- a favourite on the show- they used to be a man and their current husband or
boyfriend doesn’t have a clue. DNA or paternity tests became a thing on the
show as well once they’d been invented, and there’d be hell to pay if the test
results were unwelcome news to one of the parties . . .
The documentary also reminds us how a guest on the show, a Nancy
Campbell-Panitz, was murdered on the same day she did the show by her
ex-husband, also a guest. The lawsuit by Nancy’s sons against the show’s
producers ultimately came to nothing, but you can draw your own conclusions as
to whether you feel the killer was sufficiently riled up before and during the
show to commit a murder later on that day . . .
Could a talk show the likes of the Jerry Springer Show
succeed today, especially as we no longer bat eyelids at things like
homosexuality, transsexuality, racism, infidelity, prostitution, stripping and
pole-or-lap-dancing, transvestism and other things that used to be considered equally
controversial? I don’t really know, is the honest answer.
Maybe the show was just a snapshot in time, featuring a non-woke
culture that we wouldn’t dream of even attempting to replicate today because we’re
just too politically correct. Maybe it just wouldn’t, couldn’t, work in
a society like today’s.
I wonder what Jerry’s guests and audience members would think
about the fact that we’re half-afraid to use the word ‘Christmas’ in
advertising in case it offends the non-Christians among us, or that you can get
hate mail for accidentally, even unknowingly, ‘misgendering’ someone on live TV?
Even if you never knew them until five minutes ago when you met them in the
Green Room and have no more idea how they ‘gender’ themselves than the man in
the moon would?
Who knows? It’s a different world now to when Jerry Springer
first set up shop and TV isn’t even the number one way we access our news, information and entertainment anymore. We don’t even really ‘watch’ stuff any more in the
traditional way; we stream it, livestream it or download it. Still, Jerry was
the King of Talk Show TV and we who first encountered him in the ‘Nineties will
never forget him. All together now . . . Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!
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