Jerry Springer apologises over his controversial talk show
Talk show host Jerry Springer has apologised for his long-running controversial talk show which saw guests share their personal issues with the world.
From sex and relationships to secrets and lies, The Jerry Springer Show covered it all.
Similar to the UK's Jeremy Kyle Show, the series welcomed guests to have confrontations and realisations about their personal lives for the entertainment of a live audience and viewers at home.
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The series ran from 1991 to 2018 with episode titles including 'Pay Up or Put Out', 'We Can Share Him' and 'Slept with My Girlfriend's Brother'.
In 2018, NBC Universal announced that Springer wouldn't be making any new episodes, though those that already existed would remain in syndication.
Fast forward to this year, when Springer appeared on David Yontef's Behind the Velvet Rope podcast and joked that he would go to 'hell' for the series.
When asked if he considered himself the 'granddad of reality TV', Springer responded: "No, 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-complexioned, and that kind of worries me."
Before he began as the host of the controversial show, Springer worked as a politician who, in 1977, was elected as the mayor of Cincinnati.
He was later offered a job on the news, explaining: "After being mayor, I was offered the job to anchor the news for the NBC affiliate in Cincinnati, and I did that for 10 years."
Springer described the move from 'politics to reporting to news to anchoring' as a 'rational transition', saying: "Then how the show happened was pure luck. The company that owned the station where I did the news owned talk shows.
"They owned Phil Donahue, Sally Jesse Raphael. Well, Phil was retiring. And so the CEO took me to lunch one day and said, Phil’s retiring, we are starting a new talk show. You’re the host.
"So I was assigned to it as an employee, and then all of a sudden, the show took off. So I wound up in show business through no thought of my own."
Springer described himself as a 'schlub who got lucky' when it comes to show business, though many viewers have slammed the show for exploiting vulnerable people for entertainment.
"I forgot how awful The Jerry Springer Show was...watching reruns for the first time probably since 2000 in the rec room and I feel embarrassed just to watch it," one viewer wrote.
Another commented: "f*ck the jerry springer show and anything else like it. It's literally just "hey let's make fun of anyone who's even slightly different from us" and "let's exploit people who have serious issues in their lives because it's entertaining and funny for us 'normal' people"."
Springer has previously described the show as 'silly', admitting that he himself would 'never watch' it.
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, The Jerry Springer Show
Emily Brown