About 15 years ago, when I wasn’t the middle-class woman of a certain age I am proud to be today, I met Gregg Wallace a couple of times because my husband worked with him. I remember a breakfast meeting in a proper old-school cafe; think bacon butties, chips and tea. He was friendly and warm, with an edgy nervous energy, his bright eyes glinting just as they do on the telly.
He clearly wanted people to like him and took centre stage telling an endless stream of jokes, some of which were very fruity. Were his jokes tempered at all because I was the only woman at the table? They didn’t seem to be. You could even argue that it was refreshingly gender-blind of Wallace to treat me like one of the boys.
Over breakfast, Wallace’s compulsive need to perform and shock was intriguing, childish, endearing even. At the time I knew very little about him and wondered why he had such a craven need to be the centre of attention. Was it a knowing power play, that awful way people (usually men) use humour and banter, from the bedroom to the boardroom (sometimes in the therapy room), to silence and control people (usually women)?
It’s true that the other men at the table also gave way to Wallace’s louder, funnier voice. Honestly, though, it felt more like a relentless nervous tic, as if he had no filter, no off-button. He couldn’t stop himself from being the entertainer, giving people what he thought they wanted; laughs on demand, the more outrageous the better. I imagine it can get very tiring being Wallace, and being in Wallace’s orbit for longer than breakfast.
We all know a “Gregg” don’t we? That guy who stands a bit too close, like he doesn’t get that he’s in your personal space leaving you feeling strangely “on the back foot”.
That guy who seems desperate to take up most of the oxygen in the room, who tells edgy jokes and doesn’t seem to notice how they land badly sometimes. That guy who is often quite popular, clever and successful too. He has an adoring, patient wife, devoted children, and long-standing loyal friends. These friends brush off his occasional “problematic” behaviour arguing in his defence, “Oh you know what ***** is like, he’s a good guy really, even though he can be a bit of a d***.”
Do we challenge our “Gregg” and call him out? Unlikely. We are polite and don’t want to rock the social boat. We rationalise – it’s not our job, we’re not that close; his wife doesn’t seem to mind; his colleagues haven’t complained; it’s not our problem to fix. Don’t get involved. It’s complicated.
Nowadays we might speculate, politely behind his back of course, that our Gregg’s weird, off-kilter, inappropriate, ill-judged, unfiltered behaviour is probably because he’s, “a bit neurodivergent or something”.
Wallace might be all of the above, and from the growing avalanche of complaints against him, it seems possibly worse. But he is also a devoted single parent to his two older children, the parent of an autistic child, and until this scandal broke he was the ambassador for an autism charity. He has talked about being sexually abused as a child, experiencing homelessness and leaving school at 15, so it’s likely he experienced many ACEs (adverse childhood experiences). Add to this the toxic caldron of TV fame and privilege.
We voyeuristically devour the rolling news, self-righteously watching a working-class man’s career and life collapse, like a metaphorical dinosaur felled by a million spears at the Colosseum
Fame is weird. It amplifies pre-existing behaviour and personality traits, it can stunt developmental growth, it induces paranoia and also the belief that being famous is a licence to act with impunity, because well, it often is. The TV production company likely understood quite quickly what they were taking on as Wallace’s sexist and misogynistic behaviour was never hidden. Our TV, our media, and “the talent” who populate it, reflect our society at any given time. Are we saying we expect our stars and our TV companies to be so much better than us, when we struggle to call out our “Gregg” for his off-colour, sometimes unpleasant behaviour?
If Wallace were a client of mine, I would be keeping all this uncomfortable tension in mind in the context of his extreme sexualised behaviour. It is too easy, too simplistic to write him off as a caricature predatory sex pest. It’s said that a hallmark of mature thinking is the capacity to think contradictory thoughts at the same time. Wallace is both damaged and damaging. Like I said, it’s complicated.
If I met him today, as a woman of a certain age, I like to imagine I would call him out. I would do this to support younger, less powerful women (and men) who aren’t free to use their voice.
But I would also do it for Wallace, because I have a suspicion that Wallace’s need to shock and try it on sexually could be an addictive compulsion that he struggles to control. I would argue that there is a small, damaged child part of Wallace that longs for an adult to put a boundary in place for him; to make it stop. And yet paradoxically, perhaps sensing his fragile male vulnerability, no one dares, especially as being “the talent” seems to confer a quasi-diplomatic protection.
So why has this story attracted so much attention? Well mostly because Wallace is famous and there are good reasons for his behaviour being called out. His story highlights abuse of power in the workplace and the corrosive nature of a patriarchal system that needs to be challenged. It gives us an opportunity to reflect on ourselves and the part we play as bystanders. It helps us to learn and grow as a society. It should also be a reminder that perspectives have changed, thank God. This wouldn’t have been a story 10 years ago.
But there is also an ugliness to it all that makes me uncomfortable. We voyeuristically devour the rolling news, self-righteously watching a working-class, middle-aged man’s career and life collapse, like a metaphorical dinosaur felled by a million spears at the Colosseum.
As a therapist, I have to find understanding for the complicated little boy who against the odds made something of his life, for himself and for his children and I am concerned for him as a human being who might be pushed over the edge by the baying mob. This scenting the blood of an injured animal is not the best of us.
This article was first published on therapist-matching platform Welldoing