Steve Dymond inquest: Unaired clip from The Jeremy Kyle Show released for first time – as presenter defends himself
Jeremy Kyle has defended both his chat show and his presenting style during the inquest into the death of a man who appeared on the programme.
It came as the court was also shown clips from the unaired show for the first time.
Steve Dymond, 63, was found dead at his home in Portsmouth, Hampshire, in May 2019, seven days after taking part in the show.
Steve Dymond died after filming an episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show. Pic: Family handout/PA
A coroner found he had died of a combination of a morphine overdose and left ventricular hypertrophy in his heart.
Mr Dymond had taken a lie detector test for the ITV programme after being accused of cheating on his ex-fiancee Jane Callaghan. Following his death, the episode was not aired, and the series was later cancelled.
Kyle arrived on day three of the inquest at Winchester Coroner’s Court accompanied by his solicitor, agent and several others, wearing a dark blue suit, white shirt and light blue tie. He then sat attentively until he was called to give evidence.
The 59-year-old presenter stood by the structure of the show, saying the stories featured were “a journey” containing both “conflict” and “resolution,” and defended his style of presenting saying “it was direct, but it was empathetic, it was honest”.
The court was shown clips from the unaired episode, with one showing Kyle saying to Mr Dymond: “The truth of the matter is you, mate, you did make up a cacophony of lies, you can sit there looking upset, people could look at this and think it’s dodgy.”
After revealing the result of the lie detector test, Kyle said: “The test says you are lying, pal, you failed every single question.”
The clip showed Ms Callaghan bursting into tears with boos being heard from the audience and Mr Dymond looking shocked as he said: “I wasn’t, I have never been unfaithful.”
Kyle replied in the footage: “The studio thought you were telling the truth, I wouldn’t trust you with a chocolate button mate.”
Kyle insists guests knew what they were getting into
From a man whose whole style was cutting, quick and at times contemptuous, it was perhaps to be expected that in court we’d hear no acceptance of responsibility from Jeremy Kyle.
Choosing his words carefully, he explained his name might have been on the show but insisted he felt satisfied about moving from guest to guest knowing others would be there to give support.
How he viewed his onscreen style from back then clearly enabled a level of disassociation. “Jeremy Kyle” was a character, a part. Guests had seen his style and knew what they were getting into.
But in clips of the show which never aired, Steve Dymond looks visibly out of his depth.
Kyle berating “your conscious will serve you in time,” are words that must surely haunt the presenter now.
Once one of the most recognisable faces of daytime TV, one of ITV’s biggest TV stars is now persona non grata on mainstream television.
Previous employers are seemingly unwilling now to be associated with his hectoring style.
Kyle insisted in court today his guests knew what they were getting into.
Kyle: ‘Grow a pair of balls and tell the truth’
Another clip featured Kyle telling Mr Dymond: “Be a man, grow a pair of balls and tell her the goddam truth.”
While another featured the presenter asking, “has anyone got a shovel?” as Mr Dymond attempted to explain why he had been messaging another woman.
Kyle denied encouraging the audience to turn against Mr Dymond, telling the inquest: “Not at all – I asked them to give them a round of applause.” He said the clips showed he had “de-escalated” and “calmed” the situation rather than inflaming it.
When asked by his barrister Nick Sheldon KC if he had “egged on the audience to boo” Mr Dymond, “pounced on him”, “heckled him”, “got in his face” or called him a “traitor” or a “failure”, Kyle said: “No, not at all”.
He went on to tell the court he believed the show took “the right approach”, and he “always believed the stories were a journey.”
He said you could “absolutely” see a journey in Mr Dymond’s case, including where he and his partner “face the truth”. He said: “It is conflict, it is resolution.”
He also made clear he was “not involved in the selection of guests” on his TV show, and was “employed absolutely as the presenter,” and nothing more.
Jeremy Kyle. Pic: Channel 4/ITV/Shutterstock
Kyle later added: “The production, the producing, the after-care, the lie detector test were not my responsibility, I was the presenter,” going on to explain that while he had created a persona for the show, he had not been trained on how to handle emotional guests.
When asked by Rachel Spearing, counsel to the inquest, whether he believed Mr Dymond was humiliated on the show, Kyle answered: “I do not”.
Maya Sikand KC, the lawyer representing Steve Dymond’s family, put it to Kyle that some of the things he said to Mr Dymond during the show were “belittling,” to which he answered “I wouldn’t agree”. He said that while Mr Dymond did get upset during filming, “he wasn’t upset from the beginning, that’s the journey and that’s the way The Jeremy Kyle Show was.”
The Jeremy Kyle Show first aired in 2005 and ran for 17 series before it was cancelled on 10 May 2019, the day after Mr Dymond’s death.
It was ITV’s most popular daytime programme.
ITV stood by Kyle at the time, with the broadcaster’s director of television Kevin Lygo confirming it was piloting a new show with him later that year, although not in the same 9.30am timeslot.
Steve Dymond and Jane Callaghan on The Jeremy Kyle Show. Pic: PA
The process of the lie detector test
Ahead of Kyle’s evidence on Thursday morning, the inquest was told that after filming had finished, Mr Dymond had told a researcher: “I wish I was dead.”
Mr Dymond had rung ITV 40 to 50 times in “desperate” attempts to become a guest on the show, the inquest was previously told.
Video clips from the unaired show were played to the court, showing Mr Dymond being advised about the processes of the lie detector test.
In the video, Mr Dymond asked the polygraph examiner, who was contracted by ITV to carry out the procedure, whether the test is “99.9% accurate”, to which the examiner replied: “They are 95% accurate” with a “narrow risk of error”.
The examiner also advised Mr Dymond that “if you fail one question, you fail the lot”.
The clips also show Mr Dymond watching a video informing him about the test which advises the participant to be “truthful, open and honest”.
Jeremy Kyle. Pic: Rex
Lie detector results added ‘element of drama’
Speaking in the witness box across the second and third day of the inquest, Chris Wissun, director of content compliance at ITV at the time Mr Dymond appeared on the ITV show, explained that the lie detector test was “a very well-established editorial feature of the programme”.
He said Kyle would not have been informed of the lie detector result ahead of time but would discover the outcome in real time during the filming of the show.
Mr Wissun said: “He would open the envelope and reveal the results and tell the guests what the results were. There was an element of drama in that moment.”
The hearing heard that the show’s aftercare team had offered Mr Dymond eight to 10 sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy for self-esteem and confidence building after the show to help him address his “problem with lying”. Counselling did not go ahead due to his death.
Qualified mental health nurse Steph MacDonald, who was part of the show’s aftercare team, also gave evidence.
Ms Callaghan and Mr Dymond’s son, Carl Woolley, entered the witness box on the first day of the inquest.
Mr Dymond had been diagnosed with a depressive disorder in 1995 and taken overdoses on four previous occasions – in January 1995, twice in December 2002, and April 2005 – the hearing was told on Wednesday.
The court heard he also made another apparent suicide attempt in 2002.
He was sectioned in September 2005, and a mental health assessment then found he was at “risk of suicide”.
Mr Dymond’s death added to growing scrutiny of the duty of care that reality TV shows have to participants, coming after the death of two former Love Island contestants, Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis, in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
The hearing continues.
Anyone feeling emotionally distressed or suicidal can call Samaritans for help on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org in the UK. In the US, call the Samaritans branch in your area or 1 (800) 273-TALK
Temperatures in a hamlet in northern Scotland fell to -18.7C (-1.66F) overnight – the UK’s coldest January night in 15 years, the Met Office has said.
Altnaharra, in the northern region of the Highlands, reached the lowest temperature while nearby Kinbrace reached -17.9C (-0.22F).
It is the coldest January overnight temperature since 2010, when temperatures dropped below -15C several times at locations across the UK, including -22.3C (-8.14F) on 8 January in Altnaharra.
Forecasters had previously said there was a very small probability it could reach -19C.
A Highland cow grazing near Shotts, North Lanarkshire. Pic: PA
Met Office meteorologist Alex Deakin said: “Friday night into Saturday morning may well be the nadir of this current cold spell.”
Temperatures for large parts of the UK are set to fall again as the cold weather continues.
St Andrew’s church at Kiln Pit in Durham. Pic: PA
Met Office meteorologist Zoe Hutin said: “We’ve still got tonight to come, and tomorrow (Saturday) night could also be chilly as well.
“Temperatures for tomorrow night, it will be mainly eastern parts that see temperatures dropping widely below freezing, so East Anglia, the northeast of England, northern and eastern Scotland as well.
“So another chilly night to come on Saturday, but then as we go into Sunday and into Monday, then we can start to expect temperatures to recover somewhat.
“I won’t rule out the risk of seeing something around or just below freezing again on Sunday night into Monday, but it won’t be quite so dramatic as the temperatures that we’re going to experience as we go overnight tonight.”
Skating on a frozen flooded field in Upware, Cambridgeshire. Pic: PA
On Monday, temperatures are expected to be more in line with the seasonal norm, at about 7C to 8C.
A family walk across Hothfield Common in frosty conditions near Ashford in Kent. Pic: PA
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The freezing conditions have led to travel disruption, with Manchester Airport closing both its runways on Thursday morning because of “significant levels of snow”. They were later reopened.
Transport for Wales closed some railway lines because of damage to tracks.
Hundreds of schools in Scotland and about 90 in Wales were shut on Thursday.
Meanwhile, staff and customers at a pub thought to be Britain’s highest were finally able to leave on Thursday after being snowed in.
The Tan Hill Inn in Richmond, North Yorkshire, is 1,732 feet (528m) above sea level.
Six staff and 23 visitors were stuck, the pub said on Facebook.
Pressure on hospitals is particularly high this winter, with more than a dozen declaring critical incidents in recent days.
Hospitals struggle every winter with additional pressures due to the impact of cold weather, but the early arrival of flu this season and high volume of cases meant Christmas and New Year’s weeks were even busier than usual.
There are currently at least 20 hospitals that have declared critical incidents in England, although this is a fast-moving picture, and some trusts will go into critical incident for as little as half an hour.
The latest NHS winter situation reports give a more detailed look at the level of pressure experienced by individual trusts, including those with the worst ambulance handover delays and highest levels of flu patients.
Ambulance handover delays
When a patient arrives at a hospital in an ambulance, clinical guidelines suggest that it should take no longer than 15 minutes to transfer them into emergency care.
It is now common for handovers to regularly exceed this timeframe, however, when emergency departments are overcrowded and lack the capacity to keep up with new patient arrivals.
This is risky for patients because it delays their assessment and treatment by clinicians, and also reduces the availability of ambulances to respond to new incidents.
The trust with the longest delays was University Hospitals Plymouth, with an average handover time of three hours and 33 minutes over the week – two hours and 40 minutes longer than the average for England. It also recorded the longest average handover times for a single day, at five hours and 14 minutes on New Year’s Day.
Use the table below to search for local ambulance handover times:
On 7 January, University Hospitals Plymouth declared a critical incident at Derriford Hospital due to “significant and rising demand for hospital care”, though this has since been stood down.
The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust had an average ambulance handover time of three hours and 15 minutes, increasing by more than an hour from one hour and 51 minutes the week before.
In Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, 83% of handovers took more than 30 minutes, the highest share among areas dealing with more than five ambulance arrivals per day.
This area also recently declared and then stood down a critical incident.
In total across England, 43 trusts out of 127 had average handover times of more than an hour, while nine areas had average handover times of more than two hours.
Flu
This winter’s flu wave arrived earlier than usual and has hit health services hard.
Over New Year’s week, there were 5,407 flu patients in hospitals in England on average each day, more than three times higher than during the same week last year and increasing by 20% from the week before.
The worst impacted trusts were Northumbria Healthcare and University Hospitals Birmingham, with 15% and 13% of all available beds occupied by flu patients respectively in the latest week.
Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust had among the biggest increase in flu patients from the previous week, more than doubling from 18 to 42 patients per day on average.
Use the table below to search for local flu hospitalisations:
There are some indications that flu activity may have now peaked, with national flu surveillance showing a decrease in positive flu tests in the latest week, though activity remains at high levels.
Bed occupancy
Current NHS guidance is that a maximum of 92% of hospital beds should be occupied to reduce negative risks associated with overfilled beds.
These risks include the impact on patient flow resulting from it being more difficult to find beds for patients, and negative impacts on performance and waiting times, as well as being linked to increased infection rates.
In the week to 5 January, 92.8% of 102,546 open hospital beds were available each day on average, not far off the recommended level.
However, bed occupancy was very high in some trusts, with more than 95% of beds occupied in 43 trusts on average over the week.
The trust with the highest rate of bed occupancy was Wye Valley NHS Trust, with 99.9% of 332 beds occupied on average throughout the week.
There was only one day when beds weren’t fully occupied, on 3 January, when two beds of 322 were available.
Use the table below to search for local bed occupancy:
Kettering General Hospital NHS Trust recorded bed occupancy of 98.5% over the week. This trust declared a critical incident on 8 January.
Part of the problem for bed availability is prolonged hospital stays – also known as bed-blocking.
This is often linked to pressures in other parts of the health and social care system, for example when patients can’t be discharged to appropriate social care providers even though they are ready to leave hospital.
Just under half of beds occupied by patients in English hospitals last week were occupied by long-stay patients who had been there for seven or more days.
In seven trusts, at least three in five beds were occupied by long-stay patients, while in Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust the figure was more than four in five beds.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
The government contract for the controversial asylum barge in Dorset has ended.
The last asylum seekers are believed to have left Bibby Stockholm at the end of November after Labour said it would have cost more than £20m to run in 2025.
Its closure this month was expected, and on Friday the management firm and the Home Office confirmed to Sky News the contract had now expired.
It’s currently unclear when Bibby Stockholm will leave Portland and what it will be used for next.
The Conservative government started using the vessel in August 2023.
It said putting nearly 500 men on board while they waited for an asylum decision was cheaper than paying for hotel rooms.
However, it was controversial from the start and sparked legal challenges and protests.
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August: 2023: Barge reminds migrant of Islamic State
Days after the first group boarded there was an outbreak of Legionella bacteria in the water system and it had to be evacuated for two months.
In December 2023, an Albanian asylum seeker, Leonard Farruku, died on board.
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A Home Office spokesperson said the government was determined to reform the asylum system to make it operate “swiftly, firmly and fairly”.
“This includes our accommodation sites, as we continue to identify a range of options to reduce the use of hotels,” the new statement added.
“We are already closing some hotels and will continue to engage with local authorities and key stakeholders as part of this process.”
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