SIMPLY OUTRAGEOUS

The Jerry Springer Show changed television forever but it was also a crazy circus that was totally out of control. How do the team that made it feel about it now?

- CHARLOTTE LYTTON

JE-RRY! Je-rry! Je-rry! The chanting from my fellow audience members as they punched their fists into the air was deafening. This was 2012, when I had assumed that taking a seat at the taping of The Jerry Springer Show, one of the most bizarre, absurd spectacles in America, would be an entertaining way to pass a few hours.

A friend and I had taken a train from New York to Stamford, Connecticut, where the show was recorded from 2009 to 2018. Things took a strange turn from the moment we entered the studio. Floor managers appeared to segregate the audience by race. White attendees were directed to seats front and centre, everyone else shoved to the back and sides. Unease pooled in our stomachs.

Once the cameras started rolling, things became progressively more perturbing. Women in bikinis writhed around in tubs of baked beans, "guests" that looked like actors feigned wild distress, breaking out in fights so staged they seemed lifted from Tom and Jerry. When it was all over we left, feeling dirtier than the sauce-covered guests and questioning how this degrading sleaze fest had captured the world.

The Jerry Springer Show ran from 1991 to 2018. For most of its lifespan it was the most notorious programme on television, a cultural touchstone. Sex, adultery, love trysts, incest, paternity tests, extreme fetishes, guests wrestling, pulling hair and throwing chairs at each other were staples. Nothing was off limits.

At its peak in 1998 it beat the queen of daytime TV, Oprah Winfrey, to become the most-watched show in America, bringing in almost 8 million daily viewers. And it wasn't just Americans who lapped it up: the show was sold to around 40 countries.

Its sell was explosive exposure. If you flicked on Springer, you found members of the KKK and a far-right Jewish group decking one another; a woman who had sawn off her own legs; siblings admitting to sleeping with each other.