GREGG WALLACE is a complicated creature.
A former football hooligan — for Millwall no less — the South London greengrocer’s rise to one of the most ubiquitous faces on the box has been quite the turnaround.
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BBC bosses lapped him up because he’s the sort of charismatic ordinary geezer they don’t understand but know the punters love
And he’s from Peckham, just like Del Boy. Lovely jubbly!
So they gave him a huge chunk of the schedule — endless MasterChefs, Inside The Factory and as- sorted other shows. Working-class quota, big tick.
But once they built him up, their new man of the people became hard to control.
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I have met him on various occasions (he’s even judged my cooking in a journalists’ MasterChef) and been impressed by his enthusiasm and self-belief.
But I also know people who have worked closely with him and some describe him as not just fun and energetic but also chippy and sometimes difficult.
All agree on one thing, though — he is impossible to predict.
One minute he’s praising an amateur cook’s fondant, the next he’s thumping someone at a hotel.
And Gregg seemed wary of the people around him. He invited me for a drink one lunchtime and while we supped our pints the conversation was mostly about how he didn’t trust agents.
They were just creaming money off the top of his hard work.
He was the star, who the f* were these leeches? I enjoyed his candour — refreshing for a celebrity — but came away with the overwhelming sense that despite being a highly successful household name, the old hoolie was far from dormant.
Allegations, denied by him, that he has been inappropriate to women during the filming of another one of his TV shows add a potentially new, uglier, twist to the tale.
What more will we learn about the thrice- divorced star who became a national laughing stock after admitting he spent more time playing computer games than he did with his autistic son?
Of course, all this is as much a problem for the BBC as it is for Gregg Wallace (who insists he said nothing “sexual” back in 2018, bizarrely adding how he is madly in love with his wife).
The BBC announced on Friday it was undertaking a major review into its workplace culture.
‘Came back to bite them’
The spark for that was not just the sickening Huw Edwards affair.
It also comes off the back of the Strictly Come Dancing debacle which saw dancer Giovanni Pernice tell a contestant he wanted to “f*” them.
And also the Jermaine Jenas scandal where the Match Of The Day host sexually pestered a make-up artist.
Pernice left the show and Jenas was sacked. Wallace, though, very much remains.
So what was the difference?
Why, after being reprimanded for his behaviour, was Wallace allowed to continue fronting hundreds of hours of shows?
It was most certainly a risk for the BBC, one that arguably exposed others to someone whose “banter” could evidently be unacceptable. It duly came back to bite them.
The company conducting BBC’s review must get to the bottom of exactly how they dealt with Wallace
Colin Robertson
The Times revealed last year that Wallace stepped down from his Inside The Factory series after making “derogatory” comments about women.
That time he was apparently allowed to resign.
So why was that? Was it because the BBC was desperate to hide any bad news about a popular star who was locked in to not one but three series of MasterChef each year?
Was the prospect of having to find another “salt of the earth” presenter with a love of food just too unthinkable a task?
The company conducting the BBC’s review, Change Associates, must get to the bottom of exactly how the BBC dealt with Wallace and all the other similar incidents — and there will be many — that we, the licence payer, currently know nothing about.
Because the BBC has shown time and again that it is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to protect the “talent” it cares about.
It’s time for someone to have a proper look inside its factory.
Don’t get in such a flap over fantasy Angels
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THE Victoria’s Secret Angels are back tonight, strutting down the catwalk in their (now fake) feathered wings for their first fashion show in six years.
The lingerie brand has spent the past few years getting its knickers in a twist over exactly how woke it needs to be.
At one point it went so far down the “inclusive” road, traditional fans were put off by its lack of sparkle. Sales slumped.
The company’s new female boss has finally seen sense by rebooting the Angels to be more diverse but maintaining the thing that made them so popular in the first place.
Victoria’s Secret Angels are not supposed to represent every female form.
They are fantasy figures, pure and simple. That’s the thing about angels – they don’t actually exist.
Chat’s Radio Ga Ga
LABOUR must be feeling like one of Taylor Swift’s exes, after their brief dalliance with the star resulted in so much heartache and public humiliation they’re still struggling to shake it off.
The tickets/police escort debacle is an out-and-out scandal – and hats off to my colleague Harry Cole for exposing it. But at least the party still has the unwavering support of their tedious tribal toadies.
Indeed, for them the real scandal is that anyone thought this was worth mentioning in the first place. Chief among the a***-licking apologists was LBC radio’s Shelagh Fogarty.
She burst out laughing when Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick had the cheek to suggest that ordering police to give a billionaire pop star a blue-light passage to their £200-a-ticket concert might not be the best use of their time.
“What a little man, what a little soul he must have,” guffawed larger-than-life Shelagh.
Then came a patronising sermon about how we should all bow down to perfect Taylor, who does a lot for charity dontchaknow, and afford her all the taxpayer-funded privileges she deserves.
Shelagh’s little intervention was clipped by the broadcaster and gleefully smeared across social media.
But, judging by the comments, it was not the crowd-pleasing moment it thought it was. Indeed, it spectacularly mis-judged the mood of a public sick of Labour freebies and favours for their mates.
LBC likes to say it stands for “leading Britain’s conversation” and on this they were not wrong. That conversation being: “How ridiculous is Shelagh Fogarty?”
Get on board, Haigh
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THERE is no doubt in my mind that P&O Ferries is, to quote Transport Secretary Louise Haigh, a “cowboy operator”.
I use the channel ferries every year but have not used P&O since its disgraceful sacking of 800 staff in 2022.
So Haigh’s analysis was correct. But publicly repeating this just as P&O’s owner, DP World, was about to invest £1billion to expand its logistics operations in London was not.
Dubai-based DP World responded by threatening to shelve the plan.
Cue a mad scramble over the weekend to, successfully as it turned out, get them back on board. P&O Ferries has already had its wings clipped by new workers’ rights legislation.
DP World was well aware of this but was still in full-steam-ahead mode on plans for the London Gateway.
So Haigh – and her mouthy colleague Angela Rayner, who also echoed Haigh’s comments – had no need to slag the firm off again.
But like many in the more hyperactive wing of this new Labour administration, they just cannot help acting as if they’re still throwing insults at nasty capitalist Tories from the opposition benches.
Government requires diplomacy. And yes, sometimes that sticks in the craw, but you just have to suck it up for the greater good. (See Keir Starmer’s meeting with Donald Trump for details.)
By punishment-beating P&O again, these student politicians have simply revealed that when it comes to being in power, they are all at sea.
SO Katya Jones was joshing when she removed Wynne Evans’ wandering hand during Saturday’s Strictly?
They’re actually “amazing” friends. OK. I don’t know about you, but I don’t tend to push away embraces or ignore high- five requests from my amazing friends and then show all the signs of appearing to recoil in horror.
Could it be that Katya is paranoid that any iffy treatment of her dance partner could see her subjected to a drawn-out investigation by the BBC?
I mean, it happened to Gio. Go Compare.
COLEEN ROONEY is a brave woman going on I’m A Celeb.
Never mind the bugs and starvation diet, leaving her famously wayward husband on his own for the best part of a month is one hell of a gamble.
Randy Rooney, now boss of Plymouth Argyle, must be licking his lips at the prospect of his missus being stuck in a jungle on the other side of the world.
Meanwhile, all the good-time girls on the South Coast will be clearing their diaries for a big November party round Wazza’s.
SWEET Jesus! Now Jelly Babies are to become the victims of shrinkflation with packs cut from 190g to 165g.
What next, reducing the size of the actual babies?
To paraphrase the great Blackadder, will we soon see Jelly Baby the embryo? Jelly Baby the glint in the milkman’s eye?
