Jerry Springer is shocked. This does not come naturally. He is lying back inhis chair, arms and legs splayed out like one of those pantomime baddieshis new buddy Jean-Claude Van Damme blows away a couple of hundred times amovie. You could have caught butterflies with his open mouth. ”So, let’s get this straight, your best friend sleeps with yourgirlfriend, and you don’t mind? You don’t want to beat the hell out of him?You don’t wanna say, ‘Hey, you betrayed me. She was my girl?’ Come on,surely you wanted to kick his ass?” No, I reply. Not really. ”My, you got issues – I gotta get you on my show,” says Jerry. I can see his mental caption: ”Fiachra – does not mind his girlsleeping with his best friend.” He asks me again, as serious as I have ever seen him in the eight yearsI’ve watched him from the couch. I understood it, I said. And I suppose Iloved them both, so it was only natural in a way that they should gettogether. (I was only 19, but I didn’t tell Jerry that.) The blond eyebrows- the ones that do all the talking in those great moments when the Darlenesand Dwaynes go for each other on his show, and big Steve has to step in -are twitching like a pair of half-tamed minks. ”You are clearly some formof superbeing . . . or you got real issues,” he declares. I’m taken aback, for Jerry has just been insisting to me – made a greatpoint of it in fact – that he never, ”and I mean never”, loses his cool.So the man who has made a fortune stirring domestic conflict never loseshis temper. ”I never raise my voice. I never, ever yell. People who knowme make fun of me. By nature I tend to be an observer. I like to getperspective early – I don’t want to wait 20 years for it. So I never getbent out of shape. Maybe there is some psychological reason.” There were no fights in his family either. His parents, German Jews whosought refuge in England as the Nazis’ grip tightened around them, didn’tfight. ”They were perfect,” he says. So they were Jews who never argued?He nods, ”Right.” I ask if there was ever an Uncle Maurice character who loved to wind upeveryone round the table and then sit back and enjoy the fireworks. ”No, Iknew no one like that,” he replies. He had very few relatives of any kindleft by the time the war finished. The Nazis saw to that. And England,though safe, can’t have been all that welcoming since his parents uprootedhim from Hampstead, north London, to Queens – on the Queen Mary – when hewas five. German refugees, even Jewish ones, were interned as enemy aliensduring the war. Jerry has a lot to be angry about. But Jerry is cool. Andhe’s cool about Jerry Springer – The Opera, the little show from London’sBattersea Arts Centre that has become a cult at the UK’s National Theatreand will probably do the same on Broadway one day. ”I wish I had thoughtof it.” He saw the show at the Edinburgh Festival, Scotland, last year inan earlier incarnation and loved it. But didn’t he feel just a little bitupset? After all, he ends up in hell having sold his soul to Old Nick.”No, not for a second, because I get out with my final thought – anothervictory!” He digs the music too. Along with Kinky Friedman, he is one of America’sfew Jewish country and western singer-songwriters. ”I thought country andwestern was our show put to music, but really it’s opera. It has all thetraditional themes, gender misidentification, farce and tragedy.” And he’sgenuinely chuffed it has been credited with creating a whole new genre ofmusical theatre. ”Who would have thought it? Jerry Springer saves opera!”He is standing up now, holding both hands in the air giving the V forvictory salute. It takes great self- control not to stand up with him andchant, ”Jerry! Jerry!” as the audience do in the opera. But I don’t. For out of the corner of my eye I see Jean-Claude Van Damme standing bythe bar, alone, the picture of pathos, fiddling with his mobile phone,while everyone else on the roof terrace of the Savoy Hotel in Cannes waitsto talk to Jerry. Van Damme is supposed to be the star of their new film,Citizen Jury, but Jerry steals it – as he always does – and Jerry is thestory. Like the opera, in the film Jerry is the devil’s disciple. Playing thebaddie suits him. His Marty Rockman is a ruthless TV producer who dreams upthe ultimate reality show – a real murder suspect is tried in front of thecameras, and if the viewers vote him guilty, the execution is shown live onTV. A rightwing Republican governor of Florida with designs on the WhiteHouse – and no, his name is not Jeb Bush – champions this ”historicexperiment”, eager to draw a line in the sand against ”the tide of crimeand terrorism that is threatening America”. As Jerry readily admits, it isnot a million miles from the zeitgeist of his own show. ”It’s a wake-upcall.” His daughter Katie – who was born legally blind – urged him to do it whenthe producer’s sister buttonholed him with the treatment in a Los Angelesrestaurant. Katie is clearly as sharp a political cookie as her father, whowas elected as a campaigning, civil libertarian mayor of Cincinnati withthe city’s highest ever vote, despite being caught paying a hooker with acheque when he was a councillor three years earlier. Like Jerry, Citizen Jury is a lamb in wolf’s clothing. It looks andfeels like one of those awful God bless America pictures, but it deliversas telling a blow against capital punishment in its own way as Dancer inthe Dark. So is Citizen Jury another Springer stroke then? I ask. ”Yes, I plannedeverything,” he laughs. ”The producers are pretty much all conservativesI’d say – I’d guess they are pro [the death penalty] too – but it turnedout damning of it,” he says, allowing himself one of his Cheshire Catsmiles. Jerry has an interesting mouth. For someone who talks with suchease it is often pursed, querulous, unsure. But when that smile breaks hecan get away with anything – the hooker, the porn star and her stepmotherhe famously bedded, even (almost) the guy who killed his ex-wife after theyappeared on the show. We can’t help but love Jerry because in him the noble and the not sonoble are irresistibly matched. His eyes are following the perma-tanned PRgirl in the white tissue dress around the pool, and suddenly I’m talking toJerry the missionary, the man who worshipped and worked for Robert Kennedy,who campaigns against poverty and for better inner-city schools, and whohelped lower the voting age from 21 to 18. ”Let’s take the chewing gum out and talk real issues,” he says. ”Myshow is silly. I know everyone likes to put this cultural importance on it,but its about dating. From the start, I kept it tongue-in-cheek . . .because when you start moving TV into real life, there are consequences.Remember folks, it’s just TV. Everybody shakes hands at the end andtomorrow everything will be just fine.” And that he, insists, is whathappens – mostly. Let’s get this straight, he adds, the show was not his idea. He waspresenting the news in Cincinnati in 1991 – where he had won seven Emmys -when his station drafted him in as a straight-down-the-line replacement fortheir long-running Phil Donahue talk show. It did not work so they changedtack, radically. ”No one thought it would take off. The issue was not,’Why would I do it?’ It was, ‘Why would I quit my job?’ I have not met aperson who wouldn’t take that job, no matter what they say. ”We got a warin Iraq, let’s talk issues . . .” When Jerry talks politics his finger plays his lower lip like it was ablues harp. He’s impatient with talk of the US dragging the world to theabyss. ”America has not turned conservative overnight. One vote andCongress will go the other way. I am a Democrat and not a supporter ofBush, but I don’t think for a minute that the president is an evil man, orthat he goes to sleep at night saying, ‘Boy, how can we really screw theworld?”’ ”We get criticised – and maybe not all the decisions we have made areright – but I don’t see America as evil. We may be loud, but we are notassholes trying to take over the world. We have an American empire now, acultural one. Because we are every place, when there is a conflict, we getdrawn in, even if we don’t know how to pronounce the name of the country.Our embassies are bombed and the troops gets sent in. All of a sudden we’rean empire like Britain was. ”Everyone keeps talking about oil, but it’s not that simple. If we ranout of oil, we’d get it,” he insists. Springer was strongly againstattacking Iraq, and said so. ”But once we were in I thought, ‘It’s my kidswho are over there.’ I see those kids [on my show] as my sons and daughtersin a sense. I wanted them home safe and quick. ”Rich kids don’t generally get sent to do the tough jobs. These arebrave young men and women in a horrific situation. Once it started I wantedthat war to go well and quickly. It certainly went quickly.” The eyebrowsare now one straight mink stole, and Jerry is crouched forward, working thelip. ”The problem is that if this Iraq things gets out of hand – becauseit is unravelling. I worry that we have given a new life to the terrorists.We are stuck in a position of saying we want democracy in Iraq but thetruth is if Iraq voted they will have a government we won’t like.” ”Be careful what you wish for,” he declares, the old familiar Jerryagain, pointing his finger like he does when he delivers his final thoughtat the end of the show. For a second he looks like Uncle Sam on the oldrecruiting posters. Jerry is a patriot – ”I love my country as much as thenext guy,” more so probably since he is an immigrant. You feel he’sitching to hold its hand, to get its two conflicting natures up there inthe chairs ”working the issues”. ”Every act has a consequence beyond what is predictable. Being asuperpower means you can blow everything up but it doesn’t mean you can putit back together, or run everything. I have some objectivity,” heexplains, ”because I was born in England. England saved us: mom, dad, meand my sister, and I will love it for ever for that. So I haveperspective.” He still remembers the morning in January 1949 when ”momwoke me to look at the Statue of Liberty” as they sailed into New York.”I remember how cold it was. And how silent. No one said a word. Iremember asking my mom what the statue meant. She said, ‘One day,everything.’ She was right.” His parents’ English was never good. They spoke German to each other, butthey made sure Bridie, their Irish nanny, only spoke English to thechildren. ”They didn’t want us speaking German, that was over, gone.” German was the language of secrets. And Jerry stood outside it. Time is up. ”I need a drink,” he says. It is tempting to turn thisinto a pat little Jerry end-of-show moral, that explains the real Gerald NSpringer, his many contradictions, and his strange and colourful ascent tothe throne of confessional TV. But only Jerry knows, and he’s not saying.—