Media decides it’s suddenly time to criticise a show that’s been using poor people as zoo exhibits since 2005

Newspapers across the political spectrum have recently started highlighting the worst excesses of the Jeremy Kyle show, a programme that has spent 14 years getting vulnerable people to publicly expose their most tawdry secrets for the amusement of housewives and students.

Columnist Simon Williams, media editor for the Guardian Newspaper, was one of many to pen an outraged comment piece at the human bear-baiting that has been going on since the Blair years.

“It was high time ITV stopped using the private tragedies of the nation’s poorest people for nothing more than cheap entertainment. They have been doing it since I was at Cambridge. Used to watch it hungover. Good times.

“But you wouldn’t believe what we discovered when we looked into it. Drug addicts, teen mothers and marginalised people so desperate for cash they accept their most intimate problems to be paraded to the public.

“All the while a pub loudmouth with a mic baits them into becoming a living stereotype. But now that someone has died, it’s time to say stop.”

Mr Williams denied his profession was often too silent on the subject of shows where the working classes are portrayed as barely human creatures who only want to satisfy basic desires.

He went on, “I promise you that I will be the first to condemn if someone makes a show about portraying Geordies, Essex people or gypsies as simpletons, driven only lust and greed. But it’s hard to keep up because I don’t own a telly. More of a theatre man myself.

“I did like The Wire. So gritty!”