"Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!"
Jerry Springer, who died yesterday at the age of 79, was the king of trash TV.
Springer wouldn't have accepted that title himself, of course - he rejected the "trash" tag when it was applied to his phenomenally-successful US talk show, believing that to label it trash was a classist, snobby thing to do, coming from prejudices about the make-up of his audience; and he wasn't entirely wrong.
But to those of us who love, revere and celebrate the trashy, the crass, the lowbrow unironically, he fully deserves that crown. I'd personally put Springer up there with people like John Waters and Troma Films founder Lloyd Kaufman - individuals who fully rejoice in the trashiness of our culture, who believe in the simple joy of giving the public what they want, rather than assuming they know better than their audience.
Especially if what the public wants is T&A.
'I Refuse to Wear Clothes' is an episode of the Jerry Springer show recorded in 1997. Like a lot of Springer episodes, it has a pretty simple premise - we're here to meet an individual, or individuals, who are doing something that the majority of the general public might find shocking or unbelievable, Springer and his audience will talk to them, and the rest of us are invited to marvel at the sheer audacity of it all. It's the formula that gives Springer some of his best episodes - from the legendary 'I Married a Horse' (supposedly the production team hadn't told Springer much about what his guest was going to reveal on that one - his sickened reaction to descriptions of bestiality is genuine) to the episodes where he'd invite neo-Nazis and Klansmen on and just let his audience call them hateful moronic assholes for 47 minutes.
'I Refuse' is a bit more light-hearted than these, though. Tonight's guest is Adara Michaels, a knockout thirty-something woman who is a self-declared exhibitionist. Adara, as the title suggests, doesn't care much for being dressed; she prefers as much as possible to wear nothing (save maybe some knee-length boots and jewellery) - even out in public shopping. And although she walks on to the set wearing a tiny dress, within seconds Adara has stripped it off - and she spends the remainder of the episode completely naked, sitting on one of the famous Springer chairs (so many times knocked over or hurled in the fights that were allowed to break out between guests during many tapings) in her birthday suit and explaining and justifying her unusual lifestyle choice. Jerry, meanwhile, just goes with it ("It doesn't matter what I ask," he laughs at one point. "nobody's here to look at me.")
Conflict in the episode comes between Adara (and her fully-supportive boyfriend Eddie) and other members of Adara's family, who don't particularly care for her walking around naked in public all the time.
We even get to see a clip of Adara grocery shopping in the nude and sitting down for drinks naked at a bar, to prove she genuinely does do all the things she claims.
As the episode progresses, we're also invited to hear from Adara's best friend Amanda about what she thinks of Adara's exhibitionism - and, of course, when Amanda walks out on to the set, she is also completely naked.
Which, really, is what we're there to see, isn't it? Nobody was tuning in to this episode for a serious examination of exhibitionist kink or the rights of women (or men) to be nude in public if they are causing no harm. 'I Refuse to Wear Clothes' is just here to entertain the viewer at home with plenty of shots of 90s stripper boobs uncovered on a talk show.
With all that nudity, though, the episode couldn't really get aired in the normal Springer daytime slot. Instead, it found it's way to that other great medium of 90s trash culture - the VHS tape. 'I Refuse to Wear Clothes' was included in the Springer 'Too Hot for TV' series of tapes that purported to show clips of all the stuff that the production team had to take out in order to turn Springer's white-trash carnival of swearing, fights and sex into something that could be shown on American cable television during the daytime. The interesting thing about 'I Refuse to Wear Clothes' is that it was the first time a Too Hot for TV tape had been made up of one entire episode (the rest were all clip compilations).
Of course, 'I Refuse to Wear Clothes' was complete hokum. Adara Michaels was not actually a staunch exhibitionist who refused to wear clothes and went naked in public everywhere. In fact, Adara Michaels was an adult actress, model and performer who at the time led and choreographed a nude/exotic dance duo called SandalouS. Amanda, the best friend who claimed to share her exhibitionist nudist lifestyle, was then the other performer in ScandalouS, and boyfriend "Eddie" was really Adara's partner, but was also her manager and booker. The family members who appeared were Adara's own, but they were in on the gag. The whole public nudity thing was a bit of fun, a harmless piece of fiction intended to entertain the audience and also help promote and further Adara's adult modelling and dancing career. Adara and Amanda were simply game girls who had no compunction about stripping off in a TV studio or being filmed shopping naked in a grocery store, because stripping off and being naked was their job.
Pointing that out as a negative is a little like complaining that pro-wrestling is choreographed... because of course it is! Not every Jerry Springer guest was a fake or a plant but a high proportion of them were embellished to say the least. That's part of the legacy of the Springer show - that "manufactured reality" that is now ubiquitous in popular television, the idea that the show-makers know it isn't real, the audience, deep down, knows it isn't real - but it's more entertaining, more fun, to pretend that it is.
After all, what would we rather believe - that an adult performer was filmed naked for a few minutes leaving the hotel the show was putting her up in and going to a nearby supermarket, before spending an hour or so taping a show in the nude in a TV studio in Chicago, in the name of getting more gigs for her exotic dance show? Or, that there exists in the world random hot women who genuinely refuse to stop walking around naked in public for all to see, because they love it and nobody is going to stop them - and for the price of a basic cable subscription we can see them on TV in all their shameless glory.
Sometimes we need reality and truth, sometimes we need those things to be defended against those who would rewrite our reality to suit what they believe, even if it flies in the way of facts.
But sometimes it's harmless to acknowledge that reality can boring, and benefits from a bit of sexing up. And that's where Jerry Springer was king.
In the words of the man himself: goodnight, and look after yourselves and each other.
RIP Jerry Springer.
Further reading
Adara Michaels fan-site: Totally Adara Michaels
Uncensored clip from the episode on Spankbang.com.