When Andy Warhol coined the phase about ’15 minutes of Fame’ I bet even he didn’t envision the people who would be humiliating themselves on programmes such as The Jeremy Kyle Show. The Jeremy Kyle Show helps guests resolve any personal problems that may be troubling them, with the odd fist fight thrown in. Guests usually leave the show with their dignity in tatters, if they had any to begin with, and the offer of help from some guy called Graham. On a positive note The Jeremy Kyle Show does gives us all hope about finding love regardless of class, intelligence or what you look like. I’ve learnt that you don’t have to resemble David Beckham to fall in love or have a figure like Kelly Brook to be the most desired person on your estate. In fact you can have no teeth, a face full of tattoos and that’s just the women, and still be caught up in a love pentagon with Tom, Dick, Harry, Fred, Fred’s brother…

I thought things couldn’t get any more mortifying than people showcasing their family grudges on TV until I watched Embarrassing Bodies. Now people have a platform to display their inner troubles to the world and they can be anything from genital nasties to sebaceous cysts. Live from the clinic last week was James with the swollen testicles. Poor James was too embarrassed to visit his own GP because of the complete humiliation of showing one person in private, yet he was willing to show his mom, his mom’s work colleague Val, Tom his neighbour and just about everybody who wanted a look! Kevin was in the clinic too because of  problem with his bottom and the result was he needed a prosthetic sphincter. I thought sphincter was the rat who hung out with the Ninja Turtles, but it’s actually something medical that Kevin felt we all needed to know about. Meanwhile over at Jezza, Troy was trying to understand how his girlfriend Chardonnay could be five months pregnant with his child yet they’d only been dating for four months.

Maybe I’m being too prudish or uptight, but I can’t help asking why these people feel the need to air their dirty linen and dirty privates on TV? Are people so desperate for their 15 minutes of fame that they are willing to do anything to get on TV, even if it means telling the world they’ve just caught a Chlamydia from Gina in Magaluf?

Maybe I’m being too critical and maybe the guests on these shows need to be congratulated because at least they are trying to sort out the medical or personal problems that are plaguing them. Personally, I think the people who watch these kind of programmes are more to blame because if we didn’t watch these programmes then they wouldn’t be on our screens. I’m sure these TV programmes try to raise awareness of life- threatening illnesses and other difficult problems, but people are watching them to be entertained and to have a laugh at somebody else’s expense. I myself would never watch any of the voyeuristic programmes such as Embarrassing Bodies or The Jeremy Kyle Show and I’d take a lie detector test to prove it.