Time was when you could enjoy a spot of bear-baiting of a morning without having to endure the tut-tutting of the PC-gone-mad brigade. In Elizabethan times, Queenie herself was an ardent fan of the sport, while fighting bears – such as Sackerson, immortalised by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor – were the celebrities of their day.

Now that you have to traipse all the way to Pakistan to get yourself a bit of ursine fisticuffs, the nearest thing here is The Jeremy Kyle Show on ITV. “A form of human bear-baiting . . . under the guise of entertainment,” a judge rightly called the programme this week as he sentenced a guest who had headbutted another on stage.

And what fine entertainment it is! Unlike their Elizabethan counterparts, the bears on this show perform of their own free will (Tyson may demand $5 million for a fight, but these gladiators are happy with a night in a Travel Inn and a free mini-bar by way of payment) so it’s churlish to let one’s liberal heart bleed about the matter. Nobody’s forced them on to the show, just as nobody forced them to sleep with their pet iguana/impregnate 25 per cent of a Swindon estate/ sell stolen mopeds to fund a lighter-fuel habit (delete as applicable).

Yes, “Jezza” Kyle may be pure evil, but he is at the same time the driving force of justice in a perfectly crafted Shakespearean drama. “Let’s bring out those all-important lie detector results!” he proclaims, hunched over his producer’s index cards like Richard III in pinstripes. Ah, the beauty of the final denouement when Kevin, who hubristically thought he could fool the polygraph with the old drawing-pin-inside-the-shoe trick, comes unstuck!

Aficionados of the show will appreciate the tragic irony when, after a DNA result shows that, yes, Britney is indeed Wayne’s natural daughter, Jezza says to Wayne: “Now you can see that your wife has never cheated on you.”

But perhaps what really aggrieves our district judge is that Kyle’s shows, like Shakespeare’s plays, point to there being a compelling, natural justice beyond an institutional judiciary. The baying mob that is the studio audience, and the suggestion that it should sit in judgment, represents a dangerous threat to a postEnlightenment sense of fairness.

The notion that we live in a moral universe in which truth will always out is key to both Shakespeare and Kyle. “Foul deeds will rise,” as Hamlet soliloquises, “though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.” Our judge must also spurn Hamlet and King Lear, plays that provoke interest through their presentation of lives in turmoil.

Whenever Kyle yells his trademark “Get off my stage!”, we cannot but be reminded of the famous stage direction from The Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”

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