I love MasterChef. I reckon I have spent more hours of my life watching MasterChef than any other television programme. I cannot decide whether I prefer the standard amateur series, or MasterChef The Professionals. Laughing at the amateurs’ folly is great, scorning the professionals’ misplaced confidence – their poor aesthetic judgment masquerading as elevated taste – is perhaps better. But one impression is overwhelming: Gregg Wallace is an obvious jerk.
Wallace’s story isn’t unfamiliar. He was a working-class boy from south London who made a living selling fruit and vegetables in Covent Garden before setting up a bigger produce company and eventually finding fame as a television host. (Alan Sugar springs to mind as another barrow-boy turned star.) The next part of the story isn’t particularly unfamiliar either. It turns out Wallace has been the subject of several allegations – 13 at the time of counting – about his behaviour on the set of MasterChef, in particular his lewd comments. Wallace has since stood down from the programme, while his lawyers said it was entirely false to suggest he engages in behaviour of a sexually harassing nature.
In the intervening period, Wallace has made a bad problem worse. He took to Instagram over the weekend (a good tip for weathering a PR storm: never take to Instagram) to defend his honour. He noted that the slew of complaints made against him came from “a handful of middle-class women of a certain age” (infer “middle-aged” from that) and has since had to apologise for that, too. Downing Street stepped in (a terrible sign when stage-managing a reputational crisis) to call his comment “inappropriate and misogynistic”. As South Korea declared martial law, the BBC home page still led with the unfurling Wallace drama.
My initial thoughts are this: inappropriate comments make for a bad colleague but they are not a crime. The genuine misogyny apparent in his disdain of middle-aged women is rancorous but not surprising – this is a common disposition. Middle-aged women – I have had the fortune to learn from many – care admirably little about what unpleasant and small men like Wallace think of them.
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This drives the Wallaces of the world to madness, though they could never admit that. And I think it is worth reminding ourselves that Wallace’s attack on the middle class is a very British psychological hangup. Britain likes to mock and ridicule the bourgeoisie (think the Dursleys and Privet Drive in the Harry Potter series, or EM Forster’s novel Howards End, where the upwardly mobile Leonard Bast is killed by a falling bookcase, literally crushed by his own pretensions).
More interesting to me than all of that is the spectre of the so-called open secret. Complaints were made about Wallace several times – in 2012, 2017, 2018 and 2022. In 2018, he received an official warning from the BBC for his behaviour on a different show. But stories of ongoing behaviour – that the governance structure is largely aware of but not interested in addressing – are not restricted simply to questions of sexual probity and TV chefs. They reflect a rampant phenomenon.
[ Gregg Wallace’s ghostwriter makes new harassment allegationsOpens in new window ]
As rumours percolated earlier this year about Rishi Sunak’s plan to call a snap election over the summer, those close to the machinery of the Conservative party began taking bets on when exactly the election would be. Like Wallace’s lewd comments, gambling on your party’s imminent electoral demise is not a crime. But it turns out it is a sackable offence: by the time the campaigning got under way the media had whipped up a frenzy over the betting story and two candidates were ditched.
But gambling has long been a fixture of politics. It was only then that Westminster decided to make it a huge problem. As the Bagehot columnist wrote in the Economist at the time “all Westminster scandals are obvious in retrospect”. It is not so much a question of them being “uncovered” as it is a question of them simply being “noticed”. I cannot help but think of Wallace’s downfall as being a product of the exact same framework: there was not much uncovering and sleuthing to do, his behaviour was loud and lewd and known. All it took was for someone to finally decide that it was time to care.
TV seems particularly set up for these kinds of breakdowns. Russell Brand was tolerated for far longer than his profoundly unpleasant manner should have allowed, for example. His on-air stunt when he called Andrew Sachs and made sexually explicit comments about the actor’s granddaughter should have been enough on its own. But in an industry were the “talent” underpins the entire show there is an economic disincentive to act early and respond to complaints – you run the risk of killing your own project. The industry is designed to act only once a simmering issue has boiled over into full-on scandal. Why draw attention to some off-colour remarks by Wallace when the entire fate of MasterChef might hang on it?
I am always nervous about trial by media and think Wallace – while obviously an unpleasant character – deserves due process. But in any case it is entirely obvious how we ended up in this position – a scandal that didn’t need uncovering, simply noticing.