‘Authentic' Gregg Wallace cooks up some MasterGuff

Times

a day ago

From Gaza to Gregg Wallace. Honestly, what must it feel like to be Tim Davie, bouncing from one BBC crisis to the next? Two weeks ago the furore was about Gaza, and whether the broadcaster provided too much of a platform for anti-Israel musicians, and not enough of one for pro-Palestine documentaries. The answer to both was 'Yes', giving the BBC an unfortunate double fault. Although, on the plus side, in this country a news story hasn't achieved full lift-off until it evolves into a BBC scandal. So that's some consolation for the Gazans, I'm sure.
Last week the BBC damage limitation department pivoted to a subject even more perplexing than the Middle East: the career of Gregg Wallace. Specifically, why did the BBC not protect Wallace from its 'dangerous environment', as the man himself asked last week? And by 'dangerous environment', Wallace meant not Gaza, but BBC studios full of women who did not enjoy his 'authenticity' (copyright: Wallace). And by 'authenticity', he meant opening the door of his dressing room wearing only a sock on his penis and shouting 'Hooray!' You know, like authentic people do.
In fact, the BBC did try to protect Wallace from his environment, or vice versa, by sending him on a training course in 2019 (presumably called How Not To Grab Women by the Arse 101.) But this episode of Carry On MasterChef is not just about 'authenticity'. No, according to Wallace, it's about his recent diagnosis of autism. 'Nothing was done to investigate my disability or protect me from what I now realise was a dangerous environment for over 20 years,' Wallace wrote.
Truly, we live at the sharp edge of medical breakthroughs. Wallace has now redefined autism to mean 'adult able to hold down a prime-time TV job but incapable of making his own doctor's appointments'. According to Wallace's 'friends' (who sound a lot like Wallace), it means 'unable to wear underpants (but can wear a sock)'. Most importantly, it means 'able to leer at women with impunity'. NHS guidance, adjust yourself accordingly, please. That Wallace has a young, non-verbal autistic son makes his redefinition of the condition even more, well, let's go with 'striking'. As a medical expert once said of sex addiction, 'It's a real disease! With doctors and medicine and everything!' And by 'medical expert', I mean Will Ferrell in the 2007 comedy Blades of Glory.
If it was a bad week for the BBC, it was an even worse one for neurodiversity activists. Yes, they said, the number of adults being given a diagnosis of autism had shot up recently; no, nobody was using it as a free pass for poor behaviour. Only for Wallace to turn up like the giant Stay Puft marshmallow man in Ghostbusters, doing his cheeky-chappy best to squash all that progress like the taxi cabs beneath his clod-hopping feet. Still, I have to hand it to Wallace (at a safe distance, eyes averted) for managing — despite his crippling disability — to spot the BBC's Achilles heel: a fear of being criticised for not respecting minorities, in this case the disabled or the working class. Wallace's statement implied both, with its references to his 'warmth, character, rough edges and all'. (Obviously, I'm unsure how the working class feels about being portrayed by Wallace as analogous to Benny Hill, given I'm one of those 'middle-class women of a certain age' that Wallace sneered about last year.) Despite Wallace's deployment of this heaviest of arsenals, the BBC announced that his time there was now done.
On Tuesday the findings of a six-month investigation into Wallace's behaviour will be published. Wallace has said that it largely exonerates him, and far be it from me to doubt such a reliable witness. But I do have two questions. First, why was Wallace on TV in the first place? I have been subjected to about a zillion hours of MasterChef, because of, first, living with an adult MasterChef fan, and now living with several younger ones (an appreciation of MasterChef is, alas, hereditary, like dairy intolerance). But I never understood why he was there, given he didn't seem to know much about food, beyond appreciating the buttery biscuit base. I can handle an off-putting TV presenter if he brings knowledge to the table — Simon Cowell, say. But all Wallace seemed to bring were jokes no one laughed at, or 'character', as he called it.
• Gregg Wallace lambasts 'clickbait' BBC as the broadcaster drops him
Second, is this a story just about Wallace, or is it about something bigger? It is all too easy to think of other adults who avoid taking personal responsibility for their actions, preferring instead to soak in the sudsy bath of victimhood, hiding behind vague references to 'mental health'. Matthew Syed wrote last week about Christian Horner's long history of 'weaponising victimhood'. It's not wildly difficult to imagine the Salt Path controversy pivoting into mental health chat. Although nothing will ever top the time in 2006 when the Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten explained that he hired male prostitutes behind his wife's back to ameliorate his distress at going bald.
We live in emotionally immature times, in which too many adults use 'my mental health' as code for, 'you are not allowed to criticise anything I do' And yet blaming the times for Wallace feels like Wallace blaming his autism for his creepiness, and the fact that no one is buying his bleating about neurodiversity proves how sui generis he actually is. Finally, a glimpse of that unique Wallace quality that had heretofore eluded me. Here's to him enjoying many years of 'safe environments', by which I mean, not appearing on my TV.