Gregg Wallace, accused of “inappropriate behaviour”, had stepped away from MasterChef and was keeping his head down while lawyers were engaged – on behalf of the production company, Banijay UK, and for Wallace himself.
Or at least, that is what everyone assumed was happening.
What happened instead was Wallace unfiltered: he delivered a straight-to-camera Instagram non mea culpa on Sunday, which you really have to watch to believe. He didn’t take on any specific allegations – that he walked around the studio naked, except for a sock covering his penis; that he compared a dish to his aunt’s vagina; that he asked questions about sex, of contestants and production staff, that have been called “inappropriate”, but are actually weirder than that – intrusive and puerile, as if his higher functions had checked out and his hindbrain was doing the talking.
But anyway, he didn’t want to focus on any of that: instead, he pointed out that he had being doing MasterChef for 20 years and, in that time, had worked with more than 4,000 contestants – “all different ages, all different backgrounds, all walks of life”, he said. “Apparently, now, I’m reading in the paper, there’s been 13 complaints in that time.” I guess he was inviting us to run the numbers: what is 13, as a percentage of 4,000? Why, it’s minuscule; 99.7% of people he has come into contact with do not consider him problematic enough that they lodged a formal complaint. I’m not sure I’ve heard “There are more people who haven’t complained about me than who have” used as a defence before.
It’s not what you would call watertight, especially considering further testimony that followed. One former contestant told Sky News that the stories were the “tip of the iceberg”, that the on-set environment was “toxic”, but he had felt compelled not to discuss it because he had signed a non-disclosure agreement. Wallace’s lawyers have denied that he engages in sexually harassing behaviour.
Wallace had more to say: “I can see [the complaints] coming from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age, just from celebrity MasterChef.” The disdain he poured over the phrase “middle-class women” is so delicious; I may use it for my ringtone. Obviously, authentic, working-class women love it when you ask them what lesbians do in bed and walk around with a sock over your penis.
Nestled in there, too, was the suggestion that this is just sour grapes: when only women of a certain age are complaining, isn’t that most likely because we know the innuendo isn’t really for us and we feel left out? Yup, this makes total sense.
“This isn’t right,” Wallace continued. “In 20 years, over 20 years of television, can you imagine how many women, female contestants, have made sexual remarks? Or sexual innuendo. Can you imagine?” This may be his strangest defence of all: that he was the victim of a toxically sexualised atmosphere, assailed day to day by bawdy, salt-of-the-earth contestants.
The annoying thing is, when a scandal like this breaks, it never just lands on the perpetrator; it splashes over everyone. And, fine, there are people who should have dealt with these complaints as they happened, rather than letting them build up over years. But just the work of discovering who should have done what and when will rope in a huge number of people who had nothing to do with it, all working furiously with managers to try to prevent all future possibility of men doing this again. And I’m willing to bet a lot of that clean-up operation is being undertaken by middle-class women of a certain age. I can’t tell you how many meetings I had postponed, with people who had been called off for crisis management, just by the news that Russell Brand may be a sexual predator (which he denies).
But I’m still going to savour this moment: that he said the quiet part out loud; tried to make some combination of age, sex and class sufficient criteria to write us off as irrelevant noise. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be a middle-class woman of a certain age was very heaven.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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