‘Til next time...
... take care of yourselves and each other: On Jerry Springer, media, and complicity.
Previously: Timmy Mallett in the arena
The absolute arse ache of debating someone you don't like for people who don't particularly like you...
Correction: a typo originally said Springer was born in 1994 which would be very different
“Today on the show: Jerry Springer is dead!
We put some media bastards on a lie detector to find out if they understand what he did and why they’re doing much worse.”
First up, it’s Jeremy Kyle and we have wired the polygraph to the mains. If that works as desired, we’ve got Piers Morgan coming in next.
What you have to understand about the general understanding of Jerry Springer — if, indeed, you have any knowledge of him at all — is that the vision of him as a carnival barking emcee at a human circus is… only partly right. Jerry Springer was that thing that tabloid hacks in particular despise most: Complex.
Jerry Springer started out as an advisor to Robert F. Kennedy and won re-election with a landslide as a city councilor after his honesty in a press conference admitting he had solicited a sex worker convincingly persuaded the public — in 1974 — of his worth.
In later years, he reckoned with the damage the Jerry Springer Show did. He may carry some responsibility for the Jeremy Kyles of this world but unlike Kyle, he was not a dead-eyed thoughtless monster.
Kyle is not worthy to mop up Jerry Springer’s piss.
I watched The Jerry Springer Show as a teenager. That says something about the lax attitudes of 90s parents to content selection. It may also explain why my step-daughter saw Die Hard at Christmas with me — she is 12. Springer’s show was a triple-layered chocolate fudge sundae of salaciousness and outrage. It was custom-built to hit the audience’s pleasure receptors by serving them up the conflict, undeserved confidence, and calamities of other people’s lives.
It was a ratings juggernaut and ran from September 1991 to July 26, 2018 — airing for over 26 years, with its peak in 1997/1998, and almost 5,000 episodes in its archive. The Jerry Springer Show was also high camp; guests had high-energy arguments that often spilled over into fights that required security to intervene and carry combatants away. Through it all, Springer paced the aisle between the seating areas, questioning those on stage and in the audience with the air of a sometimes weary straight man:
I’m always wearing a suit, I don’t curse, and I wasn’t in fights involving Jell-O.
In 2005, Bernard Goldberg include Springer in his book 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, calling the show “TV’s lowest life-form” and ranking Springer at no. 32 in the country ruining rundown. He wrote that Springer deliberately capitalised on disadvantaged guests and a stupid audience, pointing particularly to an episode revolving around a man marrying his horse (references online call it a “controversial episode” as if Springer ever tried to produce an episode that was not controversial).
Marvin Kitman, the television critic at Newsday believed the show’s fights had to have been choreographed, and Professor Christopher H. Sterling compared the show to professional wrestling; some former producers claimed the show did draw inspiration from the fights, angles, faces and heels of the WWE. There were also claims from former employees that there was a fight quota.
In 2022, appearing on David Yontef’s Beyond the Velvet Rope podcast, Springer half-joked:
I just apologise. I’m so sorry. What have I done? I’ve ruined the culture. I just hope hell isn’t that hot because I burn real easy. I’m very light-complected, and that kind of worries me.
Jerry Springer gained his law degree in 1968 and went to work for Robert F. Kennedy as an advisor. He was elected to Cincinnati City Council in 1971 but quickly got embroiled in a personal scandal when he had to resign in 1974 after it was revealed he’d written a cheque for sexual services at a Kentucky massage parlour. He admitted what had happened at a highly-public press conference, and in 1975, was reelected in a landslide. In a comeback speech, he said:
A lot of you don’t know anything about me but I’ll tell you one thing you do know: My credit is good.
He was elected mayor of Cincinnati in 1977 — serving only a year because of a weird local deal between Democrats and a group of independents they relied upon to keep control of the council — and ran for governor of Ohio in 1982. His campaign ad referred to the massage parlour scandal:
The next governor is going to have to take some heavy risks and face some hard truths. I’m prepared to do that. This commercial should be proof. I’m not afraid, even of the truth, and even if it hurts.
He finished third in the Democratic primary but parlayed his profile into a career on TV as a news commentator then anchor and managing editor. He won multiple Emmy Awards for his local coverage.
Then came The Jerry Springer Show. It was initially dismissed by The Los Angeles Times as “an oppressively self-important talk hour starring a Cincinnati news anchor and former mayor.” But Springer and his producers found a format that was anything but boring, turning up the salaciousness and shock, making almost any topic fair game. The episode with the band Gwar is a highlight.
Springer explained the appeal:
Why is it so outrageous that people who aren’t famous talk about their private lives? It’s like, ‘It’s OK if good-looking people talk about who they slept with, but, please, if you are ugly, we don’t want to hear about it?’
At the end of each of the 5000 episodes, Springer delivered his final thoughts — a compelling monologue — and always ended with a line that he had developed as a news anchor,“‘Til next time: Take care of yourself, and each other.”
Springer was born in London in 1944 on the Underground, in a deep shelter. His parents were refugees who had fled Germany. He told The Chicago Tribune in 2007:
[It was] not as dramatic as it sounds: Because of the bombing, women who were in their ninth month were told to sleep in the subway stations, which were set up as maternity wards.
When Springer was 5, his family headed for the US. A consummate storyteller, he recalled the events of that move in a commencement speech to Northwestern University Law School graduates in 2008:
In silence, all the ship’s passengers gathered on the top deck of this grand ocean liner as we passed by the Statue of Liberty. My mom told me in later years (I was 5 at the time) that while we were shivering in the cold, I had asked her: ‘What are we looking at? What does the statue mean?’ In German she replied, ‘Ein tag, alles!’ (One day, everything!).”
Some recall of events from 59 years earlier, right? Of course, a talk show host, TV news anchor, and former politician would never provide the most polished version of an anecdote for an audience…
In that same Northwestern commencement address, he said:
I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy a comfortable measure of success in my various careers,” he added, “but let’s be honest, I’ve been virtually everything you can’t respect: a lawyer, a mayor, a major-market news anchor, and a talk-show host. Pray for me. If I get to heaven, we’re all going.
I don’t believe in heaven but I don’t think Springer is in hell either (whatever the satirical Jerry Springer: The Opera suggested).
He was a journalist and a storyteller who had a fascination for tales of humanity in its most flawed and fascinating forms. His show begat monsters — the Jeremy Kyles of this world — but there are many things that have had nasty unintended consequences and those of us who gorged on his show cannot pretend now to clutch our pearls.
Jerry Springer did not make the world he showed viewers; he merely placed it on a stage with the atmosphere of a professional wrestling ring and invited his audience to consider a few final thoughts after they’d enjoyed the fights:
The bias against the show is purely elitist. We’re all like the people on the show—the difference is that some of us speak better, or were born richer. There’s nothing that happens on my show that rich people don’t experience.
Good night, Jerry.
Til next time, take care of yourselves, and each other.
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Read more: * Layla plays *
The ruthless (and hilarious) sacking of Tucker Carlson shows that no one not named Murdoch is a made man at News Corp
Superb Mic!
JERRY! JERRY! JERRY!
That’s a lovely eulogy.