The boss of ITV has said she does not know of any plans to bring Jeremy Kyle back to the channel.
Dame Carolyn McCall, chief executive of ITV, told the BBC’s The Media Show the broadcaster was “looking at” cancelling the presenter’s programme prior to it being pulled from the schedules before an outcry following the death of guest Steve Dymond.
The Jeremy Kyle Show was cancelled in 2019 following the death after being a regular fixture in television schedules since 2005.
Dame Carolyn told the BBC’s The Media Show: “It was probably something we were looking at anyway to be absolutely honest with you, and I think we made the decision because we felt in that moment it was the right thing to do.”
When asked if she knew whether Kyle would make a comeback in some form on ITV, she added: “Not that I know of, I mean I don’t know what the plans are, but not that I know of at the moment.”
At a preliminary inquest hearing last year coroner Jason Pegg said Kyle “may have caused or contributed” to the death of Mr Dymond, who is suspected to have taken his own life after failing a lie detector test on the show in 2019.
Dame Carolyn also said she does not yet know whether Love Island will return to television screens this year.
“We will want to put Love Island on air because its been off air for a while,” she said.
“We didn’t do it last summer.
“We are looking at all our options at the moment because I think the pandemic makes it hard.”
The last series of Love Island aired in early 2020 before coronavirus took hold and was won by Paige Turley and Finn Tapp.
She added the “procedures and the processes and the duty of care” of the programme are “literally world class”.
“I know that we have strengthened that quite a lot and I think actually it is not because ITV wasn’t doing that well in the past,” Dame Carolyn said.
“It is just simply because social media has genuinely intensified on a show where someone is out of the limelight for six weeks, goes in quite well know but not really well known, and then comes out with thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Instagram followers, whatever it might be.”
She added: “We get a lot of previous contestants to explain exactly what it is going to be like, so you have to fully prepare and you have to make sure they are really going in consenting to this as adults and they really want to do it.”
