Has Jeremy Kyle learned anything ahead of his comeback?

It’s been more than two years since the programme that turned Kyle into a household name was last aired. The Jeremy Kyle Show’s final episode was shown the morning after 63-year-old Steve Dymond was found dead in his home.

Dymond had appeared on the show to prove he wasn’t cheating on his fiancee. He agreed to take a lie detector test (the results of which are notoriously unreliable) and failed.

The episode featuring Dymond was never broadcast, but at the time it was reported that he was jeered at by the audience and Jeremy Kyle “got in his face” and branded him a “failure” after the lie detector results were revealed.

Dymond was said to be so upset that he fell to his knees and “even at the point of collapsing” was still being heckled by the audience.

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A week after that appearance, Dymond died in an apparent suicide. The show was taken off air and ultimately cancelled. Good riddance. And now Kyle is back and claiming he has suffered the same fate.

“I have been cancelled. In this world it seems now that unless you follow a certain path, you are labelled,’’ he said.

In a separate interview with The Sun, he said he had felt “hunted” and “scapegoated” after his show was scrapped. He also described Dymond’s death as a “tragedy”.

There isn’t a person in the world (who is capable of self-reflection) that doesn’t regret how they have treated somebody in the past. I know I do. With the benefit of hindsight and experience, there are columns I wish I hadn’t written and wouldn’t write today, where I edged beyond opinion and into cruelty.

What makes Kyle’s comeback interview so distasteful is not that he has taken another job. He is as entitled as anybody else to work and earn a living. It’s the apparent lack of self-awareness about the circumstances around what he describes as being “cancelled” that is galling. It’s a word, much like “woke’, which now seems to cover everything and anything that those who deploy it don’t like.

Culture wars are easy fodder for columnists and commentators. They allow for brash headlines and furious clicks. Things are either good or bad, political correctness gone mad or good common sense. Consequences – however warranted – can now be rebranded into a “cancellation” by prominent figures who see no irony in doing a media tour to complain about being silenced.

It’s that lack of nuance that helped make The Jeremy Kyle Show so successful.

Long before guests walked on stage, the production crew had already decided who was a saint and who was a sinner. And anybody who watched the show will know that the balance of saint to sinner was always heavily weighted in favour of the latter.

It was a TV show centred on real-life stories of human misery and suffering and it was hugely profitable for both Kyle and ITV. It was exploitative and cruel. The fact it was so popular for so long is a sad indictment on us as a society.

Stories of family breakdown, addiction and mental health issues were mined and then presented to a braying audience.

After filming, executives would give the programme a rating from A-D.

One former employee explained: “An A show would be a high conflict show – not physical, but something where it goes off, there’s lots of storming around the studio, lots of heightened emotions, lots of shouting, lots of what they called ‘really good entrances’.

“When they come on and they are immediately kicking off, nine times out of 10 you’re going to get an A show for that.”

In one of the promotional interviews for his new show, Kyle said that talkRADIO and its presenters “wouldn’t be doing this unless there were people out there watching and listening to this who actually agree”.

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If his interviews in recent days are anything to go by, we know what to expect from his new show. It’s the same schtick that many of his colleagues at the station have already made their own. The “you can’t say ANYTHING any more but here I am saying it to an audience of thousands” gang.

He has a new job and good luck to him. But he didn’t lose his old one because he was a fearless truth-teller or because he said what is apparently unsayable. He lost it because the programme that he hosted preyed on people during their lowest moments and a man died as a result.

Maybe Jeremy Kyle thinks that enough time has passed between the show’s cancellation and his big comeback that he can rewrite history and nobody will notice.

Or perhaps, he has watched how the thirst for confrontation has spread from reality TV to news and is sure that he has found a receptive new audience.