'My show is silly'

Jerry Springer is shocked. This does not come naturally. He is lying back in his chair, arms and legs splayed out like one of those pantomime baddies his new buddy Jean-Claude Van Damme blows away a couple of hundred times a movie. You could have caught butterflies with his open gob.

"So, let's get this straight, your best friend sleeps with your girlfriend, 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 girl sleeping with his best friend."

He asks me again, as serious as I have ever seen him in the eight years I've watched him from the couch. I understood it, I said. And I suppose I loved them both, so it was only natural in a way that they should get together. (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 Darlenes and 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 form of superbeing ... or you got real issues," he declares.

I'm taken aback, for Jerry has just been insisting to me - made a great point 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 loses his temper. "I never raise my voice. I never, ever yell. People who know me make fun of me. By nature I tend to be an observer. I like to get perspective early - I don't want to wait 20 years for it. So I never get bent out of shape. Maybe there is some psychological reason."

There were no fights in his family either. His parents, German Jews who sought refuge in England as the Nazis' grip tightened around them, didn't fight. "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 up everyone round the table and then sit back and enjoy the fireworks. "No, I knew no one like that," he replies. He had very few relatives of any kind left 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 uprooted him from Hampstead, north London, to Queens - on the Queen Mary - when he was five. German refugees, even Jewish ones, were interned as enemy aliens during the war. Jerry has a lot to be angry about. But Jerry is cool. And he's cool about Jerry Springer - The Opera, the little show from the Battersea Arts Centre that has become a cult at the National Theatre and will probably do the same on Broadway one day. "I wish I had thought of it." He saw the show at the Edinburgh Festival last year in an earlier incarnation and loved it. But didn't he feel just a little bit upset? 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 - another victory!"

He digs the music too. Along with Kinky Friedman, he is one of America's few Jewish country and western singer-songwriters. "I thought country and western was our show put to music, but really it's opera. It has all the traditional themes, gender misidentification, farce and tragedy." And he's genuinely chuffed it has been credited with creating a whole new genre of musical theatre. "Who would have thought it? Jerry Springer saves opera!" He is standing up now, holding both hands in the air giving the V for victory salute. It takes great self-control not to stand up with him and chant, "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 by the bar, alone, the picture of pathos, fiddling with his mobile phone, while everyone else on the roof terrace of the Savoy Hotel in Cannes waits to 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 the story.

Like the opera, in the film Jerry is the devil's disciple. Playing the baddie suits him. His Marty Rockman is a ruthless TV producer who dreams up the ultimate reality show - a real murder suspect is tried in front of the cameras, and if the viewers vote him guilty, the execution is shown live on TV. A rightwing Republican governor of Florida with designs on the White House - and no, his name is not Jeb Bush - champions this "historic experiment", eager to draw a line in the sand against "the tide of crime and terrorism that is threatening America". As Jerry readily admits, it is not a million miles from the zeitgeist of his own show. "It's a wake-up call."

His daughter Katie - who was born legally blind - urged him to do it when the producer's sister buttonholed him with the treatment in a Los Angeles restaurant. Katie is clearly as sharp a political cookie as her father, who was elected as a campaigning, civil libertarian mayor of Cincinnati with the city's highest ever vote, despite being caught paying a hooker with a cheque when he was a councillor three years earlier.

Like Jerry, Citizen Jury is a lamb in wolf's clothing. It looks and feels like one of those awful God bless America pictures, but it delivers as telling a blow against capital punishment in its own way as Dancer in the Dark.

So is Citizen Jury another Springer stroke then? I ask. "Yes, I planned everything," he laughs. "The producers are pretty much all conservatives I'd say - I'd guess they are pro [the death penalty] too - but it turned out damning of it," he says, allowing himself one of his Cheshire Cat smiles. Jerry has an interesting mouth. For someone who talks with such ease it is often pursed, querulous, unsure. But when that smile breaks he can get away with anything - the hooker, the porn star and her stepmother he famously bedded, even (almost) the guy who killed his ex-wife after they appeared on the show.

We can't help but love Jerry because in him the noble and the not so noble are irresistibly matched. His eyes are following the perma-tanned PR girl in the white tissue dress around the pool, and suddenly I'm talking to Jerry the missionary, the man who worshipped and worked for Robert Kennedy, who campaigns against poverty and for better inner-city schools, and who helped lower the voting age from 21 to 18.

"Let's take the chewing gum out and talk real issues," he says. "My show 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 and tomorrow everything will be just fine." And that he, insists, is what happens - mostly.

Let's get this straight, he adds, the show was not his idea. He was presenting 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 for their long-running Phil Donahue talk show. It did not work so they changed tack, 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 a person who wouldn't take that job, no matter what they say. "We got a war in Iraq, let's talk issues ..."

When Jerry talks politics his finger plays his lower lip like it was a blues harp. He's impatient with talk of the US dragging the world to the abyss. "America has not turned conservative overnight. One vote and Congress will go the other way. I am a Democrat and not a supporter of Bush, but I don't think for a minute that the president is an evil man, or that he goes to sleep at night saying, 'Boy, how can we really screw the world?'"

"We get criticised - and maybe not all the decisions we have made are right - but I don't see America as evil. We may be loud, but we are not assholes trying to take over the world. We have an American empire now, a cultural one. Because we are every place, when there is a conflict, we get drawn 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're an empire like Britain was.

"Everyone keeps talking about oil, but it's not that simple. If we ran out of oil, we'd get it," he insists. Springer was strongly against attacking Iraq, and said so. "But once we were in I thought, 'It's my kids who are over there.' I see those kids [on my show] as my sons and daughters in a sense. I wanted them home safe and quick.

"Rich kids don't generally get sent to do the tough jobs. These are brave young men and women in a horrific situation. Once it started I wanted that war to go well and quickly. It certainly went quickly." The eyebrows are now one straight mink stole, and Jerry is crouched forward, working the lip. "The problem is that if this Iraq things gets out of hand - because it 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 the truth is if Iraq voted they will have a government we won't like."

"Be careful what you wish for," he declares, the old familiar Jerry again, pointing his finger like he does when he delivers his final thought at the end of the show. For a second he looks like Uncle Sam on the old recruiting posters. Jerry is a patriot - "I love my country as much as the next guy," more so probably since he is an immigrant. You feel he's itching to hold its hand, to get its two conflicting natures up there in the chairs "working the issues".

"Every act has a consequence beyond what is predictable. Being a superpower means you can blow everything up but it doesn't mean you can put it back together, or run everything. I have some objectivity," he explains, "because I was born in England. England saved us: mom, dad, me and my sister, and I will love it forever for that. So I have perspective." He still remembers the morning in January 1949 when "mom woke 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. I remember 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, but they made sure Bridie, their Irish nanny, only spoke English to the children. "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 this into a pat little Jerry end-of-show moral, that explains the real Gerald N Springer, his many contradictions, and his strange and colourful ascent to the throne of confessional TV.

But only Jerry knows, and he's not saying.