If you’re British or familiar with cozy UK TV then the chances are you’re familiar with Gregg Wallace. He’s become a mainstay of primetime entertainment on British small screens, usually seen on shows related to food or cooking. He’s written regularly for major publications and has published several cookbooks. He’s got an MBE and was a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing. Wallace is somewhat ubiquitous on our tellies on my side of the pond. He’s now going viral worldwide after it was announced that he was being investigated for allegations of historical misconduct. Here’s a quick explainer for you non-Brits who are fortunate enough to not know who this jerk is.
Gregg Wallace started out as a wholesale greengrocer but soon parlayed that into a career in broadcasting, hosting something called Veg Talk on BBC Radio 4 and being the original presenter for Saturday Kitchen (he was replaced after a year. He’s most famous for co-hosting the reboot of Masterchef alongside actual chef John Torode. Their basic set-up was that Torode was the moody culinary expert and Wallace was the cheeky chappy who made a few puns. Because Masterchef is such a huge hit in the UK, being one of the most reliable primetime hits for the BBC, Wallace started turning up everywhere. He’s hosted programmes on a variety of networks, usually food-themed but not always. If you need a contestant for a celeb special episode of a quiz show then he’s always available.
Last month, it reports began to emerge of Wallace demonstrating inappropriate behaviour during the production of Masterchef. One person to step forward was Kirsty Wark, a stalwart figure in British news, who had appeared on an episode of Celebrity Masterchef in 2011. She claimed that Wallace repeatedly told stories and jokes of a ‘sexualized nature’ during filming, and that people were evidently uncomfortable with his behaviour. Wark was one of 14 people at this time who came forward with similar stories. One person said that Wallace talked openly about his sex life during filming, while another said he took his top off in front of a female worker saying he wanted to “give her a fashion show.” The singer Rod Stewart lambasted Wallace on Instagram for bullying his wife, Penny Lancaster, when she appeared on the show. Stewart called him a ‘tubby, bald-headed, ill-mannered bully.’
As Wallace stepped aside from the show pending a BBC investigation, even more allegations of his sleaziness came to the forefront. The Observer revealed that a letter had been sent to the BBC in 2022 detailing a ‘pattern of behaviour’ by Wallace that ‘clearly fails to meet the sexual harassment and bullying standards that prohibit unwelcome sexual advances and sexual innuendo.’ It also emerged that Wallace had been warned by a BBC executive about his ‘unacceptable’ behaviour in 2017 after another Celebrity Masterchef contestant, Aasmah Mir, complained. Melanie Sykes, an artist and former TV presenter, said that Wallace’s ‘jaw-dropping’ unprofessional behaviour during Celebrity Masterchef was one of the reasons she quit the industry altogether (she had previously written about him in her autobiography, saying, ‘Every time Gregg came over to the desk, I didn’t really like him being around.’) Other former contestants and industry figures like
Then, an audience member from an event that Wallace hosted at the BBC Good Food Show in 2012 said that Wallace had tried to get the sign language interpreter to sign inappropriate words for him, like ‘big boobs.’ A former Masterchef contestant, Dr. Kate Tomas, saidi that Wallace was a ‘racist piece of sh*t’ during her time on the show, that he sexually harassed her, and that he impersonated an Indian accent in front of a staff member who was Indian. Vanessa Feltz and Kirstie Allsopp, described similar experiences with Wallace wherein, without prompting, he would brag about sex acts he’d done with his partners. The actor and author Emma Kennedy said she complained about the presenter to production staff in 2012 after he allegedly touched another woman’s bottom.
Wallace decided to respond to these mounting allegations by further digging his own grave. While denying all of the accusations, he claimed that In a video posted to his Instagram page, Wallace dismissed the allegations by saying that there were coming from “a handful of middle-class women of a certain age, just from Celebrity MasterChef.” That didn’t go down well, and not just because it was a lie. This led to backlash not only from former fans and the accusers but members of parliament.
The BBC has now pulled two Masterchef episodes from its Christmas schedule. This comes after they’d previously announced plans to keep the show on the air amid the investigations. What made them change their minds? New allegations from three women included accusations of Wallace groping them, exposing his penis, and pressing his crotch against women during filming.
Whispers of Wallace’s inappropriate behaviour masquerading as ‘banter’ has been an open secret in the industry for years. Readers of the newsletter Popbitch will be aware of many such stories, including ones where he compared Masterchef contestants’ food to genitalia. That the BBC seems to have done nothing for many years despite increasing numbers of complaints, often from high-profile individuals like Kirsty Wark and Melanie Sykes, speaks volumes about the ingrained culture of culpability and misogyny. This is something the BBC has had to contend with for a while now, particularly the past 12 or so years following the literal thousands of allegations made against former presenter and serial rapist Jimmy Savile. Over the past year, the BBC has also dealt with the fallout over the charges against former newsreader Huw Edwards, who recently pleaded guilty to making indecent images of children.
I talked about Wallace being a constant presence on TV here, but you’d be hard-pressed to find people who are actually fans of his. It’s almost a running joke at this point in time that he’s famous in spite of our pleas. On Masterchef, he’s largely there to react to the chefs doing all the work and displays zero real knowledge of world cuisine. He infamously got pushback for criticizing a Malaysian contestant’s dish of chicken rendang and claiming it was inedible because it wasn’t crispy enough. Rendang, for those who don’t know, is a stewed dish that isn’t meant to be crispy. He’s charmless in the way that suggests he believes himself to be a magnetic and irreplaceable icon, and his lack of self-awareness would be charming if it were any other human being. Earlier this year, he went viral after a ‘Day in the Life’ piece he contributed to The Telegraph had him admitting that he spends more time playing video games than hanging out with his young autistic child. To put it bluntly, he’s just a wanker.
His actions are all too often the kind of crap that people dismiss as being ‘not that serious.’ Oh, he made sexually aggressive comments at you in your place of work? That’s just banter, right? He’s just having a laugh. It’s not as bad as Harvey Weinstein, surely? Battles against workplace abuses often fall into the trap of perpetuating a tiered system of offences, which leaves so-called low-level accusations like the ones made against Wallace being seen as, if not acceptable then at least more frivolous. A hell of a lot of powerful people post-#MeToo decided that anyone who wasn’t accused of outright serial rape was a credible candidate to be welcomed back to the upper echelons of the elite with zero repercussions or impact to their lives.
I reject this. It’s patently nonsense and sexist as all hell. Everyone has the right to go to their workplace and not be besieged by cruelty, aggression, and sexual harassment. That’s what this is. It is 100% sexual harassment for a man to force you to listen to him brag about his sex drive while you’re just trying to do your job. It’s a sickness when a man who is essentially your professional superior gets to lord it around the set, treat women like props, and leer at them while claiming it’s a joke.
The BBC needs to ditch this creep but it also needs to reckon with the staggering ignorance and misogyny it fostered that ever allowed them to think that this uninterrupted pattern of behaviour was acceptable and tolerated. Nothing of value will be lost by getting rid of Gregg Wallace.