Two and a half years ago the composer Richard Thomas asked me to help with a Battersea Arts Centre workshop of his un-finished epic, Jerry Springer The Opera. I thought it would take a couple of months. We didn’t expect a National Theatre run, or a West End transfer, and we certainly didn’t expect to be called to account years later by the eponymous hero. This would never happen to Andrew Lloyd Webber. The Phantom of The Opera, Barbara Dixon and Jesus Christ Superstar are all fictional characters. But Springer had seen a semi-staged version of the unfinished score at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2002, after which he seemed delighted and decided not to take legal action. Then, three nights before our West End opening, after graciously agreeing to come over and do some press, Springer watched a preview of the finished show. From where I was sitting the very real Jerry Springer seemed to be suppressing a very real dissatisfaction.

It wasn’t until the final stages of the National Theatre rehearsal period that I did any research into Jerry Springer’s life. Richard’s words and music captured the essential flavour of Springer’s show and we didn’t necessarily want the real Springer to intrude into the fictional Jerry’s role in the opera. But now the piece was finished, and so I agreed to interview the man himself for Time Out. Over biscuits in a hotel suite, Springer’s PA queried chronological errors involving an sex scandal and Springer’s election as mayor of Cincinnati. It seemed reasonable to make simple changes to one of his speeches. But Springer’s anxieties, it transpired when he arrived, ran deeper. We saw the Jerry of Jerry Springer The Opera as a tragic hero, disappointed in the show he hosts, who, in the closing moments of his life, is given a chance to do something amazing, literally making peace between Heaven and Hell. The real Springer however, is happy with his TV show for two reasons. Firstly, he insists that it is not really him hosting The Jerry Springer Show; “It is a fictionalised character,” he explains, “and I’ve worked pretty hard at developing this persona in The Jerry Springer Show that would not be me so that I could keep this separation in my life, yet this persona has been going on for thirteen years.” This weird division of the self is not unusual in showbiz. I was once lucky enough to work with the late great Rod Hull, who seemed strangely resentful of Emu, even though the bird was effectively only his own arm encased in blue wool.

Secondly, Springer, who hopes to return to his career as a Democrat politician, believes that shows like the infamous I Married A Horse help society. He is upset by our scene in which he hangs in a gibbet over a pit of hellfire, and saves his skin by uniting God and The Devil and declaring, “Energy is pure delight, nothing is wrong and nothing is right, and everything that lives is Holy.” “(That idea) is 180 degrees the opposite of my philosophy,” Springer asserts, “I believe that free speech is the way, so we can determine the difference between right and wrong. The beauty of the show is we permit all ideas to be heard and therefore we can determine that sleeping with a horse is clearly wrong. I’ve never ever believed there is no difference between right and wrong. You are playing into the hands of the Conservatives. That is their excuse for cutting out freedom. That was Hitler’s excuse for the Holocaust. I make it very clear every single show that there is a right and wrong … from God.”

Sometimes Springer sees morality as divinely decreed, while at other times he admits it is based on a kind of straw poll that will have to serve ‘until God talks to us personally.’ With regard to the Horse episode he says, “If you don’t permit the discussion of human relationships an individual has with anything else then it’s not too much of a leap to say, as was said only a few years ago in a country as free as America, that no white person can have a relationship with a black person, or a man cannot have a relationship with another man. There’s one person in a country of 250 million Americans that says ‘I wanna be with my horse’, and 249 million 999 thousand Americans agree with the Bible, that that’s wrong. Oh my, it fell of its own weight, overwhelmingly. In the next segment of the show there’s two guys together. Now it isn’t 250 million to one, it’s 200 million to 50 million. And that’s freedom.” But conventional readings of God’s word, in the Old Testament and Paul’s letters, consider homosexual relationships and human-animal relationships equally evil? “Sure and there’s some people that believe in this bible, and there’s some people that believe in the Koran,” Springer counters, “and there’s other people that believe in another bible. There’s some people that are agnostic. There’s some people that don’t believe in God at all.” Springer himself believes in God and when asked if he thinks there’s an objective moral correlative for human behaviour says, “I absolutely do.”

Distancing himself from the running of The Jerry Springer Show, Springer emphasises that, “All I do is host the show. I don’t produce the show, I don’t come up with the ideas for the show, I don’t choose the guests. I show up to host a show that has been created by other people, it’s other people’s ideas.” Yet he also feels The Jerry Springer Show functions as a social check and balance. Do the producers of the show share this improving notion? “In the beginning the subjects were more serious. Now the instruction I’ve been given is it must be about outrageous people or people in outrageous situations. That is the edict. That is what I am hired to do. If I wanna go and do another show, I have to leave the company and hope someone hires me to do another show.” The real Springer is only following orders, and thus queried the fact that our Jerry is very much in control.

“The scene where I am sitting back with the cigar firing the warm-up guy, yelling, is truly no role that I ever play, no authority that I ever have,” he reasons. “That character in the opera, this is his show, he created it, he wants the crowd to do this, he wants the crowd to do that. I’ve never been involved in a discussion about any of that. The producer decides who ought to get hired and what it ought to be like. I show up and I do the show whatever. That’s too Machiavellian.” As I explain that we see that scene as Jerry, a non-interventionist God, firing the warm-up man in the same way as Satan is cast out of Heaven, I realise we are talking at cross purposes. “Well,” the real Springer concedes, “what you really got right is how I physically and emotionally step back from the confrontation all the time. I would probably step out of that (argument). He could be fired and come and ask me for help.”

During the photo-shoot I am confused and embarrassed. Jerry Springer The Opera momentarily feels like a situationist prank that has got out of hand, and of course it must be utterly bewildering to find yourself the subject of such a vast enterprise. Indeed, a friend said to me one night, “Imagine, if the opera runs for ever. In fifty years time people will be saying, ‘Did you know Jerry Springer was actually a real person?”” “There’s no way you can prepare for it,” Springer confessed, “Michael Brandon’s got me down cold. It was an out of body experience.” Before he leaves, Springer quietly grills me on the opera’s closing image. The dead Jerry rises to his feet and ascends a staircase into a pool of fading light. Some American liberals in one audience found the apparent deification of a man they considered despicable to be deeply offensive. Springer wants to know what it means? Is he ascending into heaven? We don’t know the answer. Originally our Jerry was met on the stairs by Jesus and The Devil, but we pulled them out because it seemed too pointed. We preferred the inconclusive conclusion. But I suppose, when one is the subject of an opera, you are at least looking for a sense of closure. Like our Jerry, we don’t really do conflict resolution.

On opening night, it was hoped that Springer would bow alongside the cast, but he didn’t want to endorse the show directly. In the event, the audience clapped him out of the aisle, up onto the stage. The last I saw of him, as 1200 people stood to their feet and applauded, he at least looked happy. I hope he is.