IT was no surprise when The Jeremy Kyle Show was taken off air this week.

As often happens in TV it took an incident - the death of a guest just days after his appearance on the ITV morning show - to lead bosses to act.

Confession time, I must admit I was once a viewer, as I was of its predecessor Trisha and the US talk show Jerry Springer. These shows are the ultimate in reality television, people airing their dirty laundry and being held to account for cheating, stealing, and men revealed as fathers.

It required no brain power to watch them and the audience reactions, booing and cheering, basically told you what to think.

But it became obvious they were exploiting the guests, who clearly had mental health issues amongst others, and should be nowhere near a television studio.

Details began to emerge exactly why ITV had axed the show, and deleted it from its catch-up service, yesterday. Reports say the guest who died was 63-year-old Steve Dymond who took a lie detector test to convince fiancee, Jane Callaghan, he had not cheated. But after it concluded he was lying they split and within days he was found dead.

The show has been controversial many times, which I thought would have led to it being canned. In 2008, a man who found out he was not the father of his wife’s child pointed an air rifle at her after the show, and that came after dad of 17, Mick Philpott, appeared on Kyle’s programme to defend his lifestyle. He was later found guilty of causing the deaths of five of his children and another child in an arson in 2012. The whole problem with the show is that, however much ITV claims to have excellent aftercare for the people they feature - it is all about humiliating them for entertainment.

And those involved in the production know it. Kyle’s trusty sidekick, therapist Graham Stanier once stormed off Sky News when the show was even mentioned.

The format is also flawed. For instance, those lie detector results relied on for drama. Kyle claims it has a 96 per cent accuracy when, in reality, this is disputed with experts saying its accuracy could be as low as 61 per cent.

They say it’s temporarily off-air but I can’t see how ITV can allow this to carry on. So you have to assume it's going to be axed for good - like it should have been years ago.

READ MORE: Jeremy Kyle Show ‘a theatre of cruelty’