A High Court judge will be forced to watch several hours of The Jerry Springer Show to help settle a legal spat between the US chat programme’s producer and its UK licensee.

A Court of Appeal judge ruled today that the dispute between Flextech Television, which owns the rights to broadcast the show in the UK, and its producer Universal Studios International will have to be decided at a full trial because episodes of the programme will need to be considered as evidence.

Flextech claims it is entitled to cancel its contract with Universal because the content of the talk show has changed so much and become so controversial that it has become impossible to show certain episodes.

Universal says the programme is still broadly the same as when the multi-million pound licensing agreement was signed in 1998 and is refusing to let Flextech cancel the deal.

Lord Justice Neuberger said: "It must be necessary for the judge who determines such issues to see at least some of the episodes although I would strongly encourage the parties to agree a sensible basis upon which the trial judge can reach a conclusion on the issues without having to view anything like the totality of all the episodes."

Today’s ruling means a High Court judge faces the prospect of watching edited highlights of around 400 hours of Jerry Springer in order to compare the original 1997 series with a later 2001 season.

Flextech told an earlier hearing that while the 1997 series was "mainstream viewing suitable for broadcast during the daytime", it "deteriorated from season to season" and by 2001 the "vast majority" of episodes contained content that was unsuitable for daytime viewing.

Lord Justice Neuberger said the fact that there was an increase in the number of episodes which were did considered suitable for daytime broadcast under the UK’s television guidelines did not decide the issue of whether there had been a breach of the contract.

He said it was up to a trial judge to decide whether there had been "a change of content" sufficient to cause a breach and that this would have to involve a comparison of individual episodes of the various series.

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