I wouldn’t want to be John Torode right now. The buffoon he’s stood next to for the last two decades has allegedly made one sexually explicit joke too many, the MasterChef extended universe is on the brink of implosion – and the PR disaster is threatening to take down Torode’s career with it as collateral.
Gregg Wallace added insult to injury over the weekend, with his Instagram video describing the multiple complaints of inappropriate behaviour from former MasterChef contestants as being from “middle class women of a certain age”. A misfire, or a punt for a gig as a pundit on GB News? Either way, it has been widely denounced as misogynistic and he has since apologised.
No word on whether he retracts the video’s reasoning that out of the 4,000 contestants over whom he’s adjudicated on MasterChef in the last 19 years only 13 have alleged harassment. It’s not quite zero, but it’s very close – 0.33 per cent, in fact, and if you can’t sexually harass 0.33 per cent of women across a 19-year period, then political correctness really has gone mad.
It’s yet another scandal the BBC does not need in what must be one of the worst years in its 102-year history. Now the corporation faces difficult decisions about whether to continue airing MasterChef: The Professionals, and whether to disrupt the Christmas schedules and pull every programme in which Wallace features. No small feat – you cannot get away from him.
Whatever the BBC’s investigations turn up I think we can assume Wallace won’t be welcomed back into the MasterChef kitchen any time soon. But what about John Torode? If he wants to avoid his reputation being sullied by association he has two choices: apologise for appearing alongside Wallace while the latter behaved on set in a manner that was unacceptable and inappropriate, or plead ignorance and hope that the public believe him.
So far Torode has gone for silence, something Wallace – who had Torode as best man at his wedding in 2016 – is “FURIOUS” about according to The Sun and which has prompted him to unfollow Torode and his wife Lisa Faulkner on Instagram. (I think being unfollowed will hurt a lot less than the financial fallout of Wallace’s alleged indiscretions, but if it makes him feel better…) Torode cannot possibly defend Wallace, and I don’t think we can expect an address to camera from the Holly Willoughby school of crisis management, à la her, “How are YOU doing?”.
If the This Morning fiasco taught us anything it’s that the TV double act is a precarious entity, especially when one half of it gets in to very big trouble. In recent years some of TV’s most bankable pairings have been put to the ultimate test. Ant and Dec in 2018, when McPartlin caused a three-car crash while drink driving, and Holly and Phil in 2023, when Phillip Schofield admitted to an affair with a younger male colleague.
Both of those acts relied on the double acts’ very public friendships – Ant and Dec’s was genuine, and, with their careers, it survived. Holly and Phil’s did not – both of them eventually departed the programme and even Willoughby has kept a low profile ever since.
Wallace and Torode’s relationship, however, is different. They have not dined out on being best friends, their dynamic on MasterChef has not relied on banter or camaraderie so much as, erm, tolerance, and indeed their interactions with each other do not define the show. Where Ant and Dec’s warmth, shared memories, easy chemistry and general boyishness gives formulas like I’m a Celeb a personality, Gregg and John are just getting on with the job – Torode’s ostensibly “being a food expert”, Wallace’s “saying things enthusiastically” – as long-suffering colleagues at best.
Certainly that was the impression I got when I interviewed them over lunch about six years ago – Torode heavy-eyed and with an air of resignation; Wallace enthusiastic and saying everything immediately as it popped in to his head while those around him rolled their eyes and joked about how they put up with him.
Picture Droopy Dog, the Bassett hound from Tom and Jerry, and his opposite, Screwy Squirrel. When I asked about their relationship it was explained more or less as “we see each other at work all day so why would we spend our free time together, too?”, which seemed to be confirmed when Torode’s teenage children showed up at the restaurant and Wallace told me he hadn’t seen them since they were “this big”.
When Torode eventually breaks his silence, he may well repeat his claim that they were “never friends” ad nauseum. He is not the accused, is not implicated in the claims against the accused, but will nevertheless always be associated with Wallace, and must be very worried indeed.
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