‘We are not afraid of men of a certain age’: A BBC presenter just had the worst reaction to sexual harassment allegations
Gregg Wallace is the presenter of the BBC’s MasterChef, and turns out he’s also a master of misogyny. News broke on November 28 that he had been making inappropriate, sexualized comments to people he worked with on the show.
Leading the charge against him was Kirsty Wark, who appeared alongside Wallace on Celebrity MasterChef in 2011. She told the BBC that she was, “more angry than anything else, because I thought it was so inappropriate. And in a sense what I thought was it was about power more than anything else, that he felt he could.”
The BBC also heard that Wallace made comments about his own sex life to people, took his top off in front of a female member of staff, and showed off topless pics of himself, among other accusations. All in all, it demonstrates a pattern of very bad behavior and people were right to speak out.
British national treasure Sir Rod Stewart also stepped in to make his own complaint against Wallace after the news broke. He took to Instagram and wrote, “You humiliated my wife when she was on the show, but you had that part cut out didn’t you? You’re a tubby, bald-headed, ill-mannered bully. Karma got you.” It’s not known exactly what transpired between Wallace and Stewart’s wife, Penny Lancaster.
By the time the weekend rolled round things were looking very bad indeed for Wallace. But then he decided to dig his own grave further with an extremely ill-advised “deflect everything” video posted to Instagram on Sunday and reported on by the BBC. He said that he’d worked with “over 4,000 contestants of all different ages, all different backgrounds, all walks of life” and yet there had been “13 complaints.” He then declared, “Now, in the newspaper I can see the complaints coming from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age just from Celebrity MasterChef. This isn’t right.”
There was an outcry over the now-deleted video. Women from all over Britain used the hashtag #MiddleClassWomenOfACertainAge to call out Wallace and speak about other times men had made them feel humiliated or unsafe.
One of the women who took to Twitter was presenter Kirstie Allsopp, another familiar face on British TV. She alleged that Wallace had been inappropriate to her, as well.
Another famous presenter, Ulrika Jonsson, took her Wallace allegations to the Daily Telegraph. She told the newspaper that he had made a rape joke in front of her, and said, “When he made reference to women of a certain age I was just seething… I was just absolutely wild. My first reaction was just, ‘Keep digging, Gregg. Keep digging,’ because this shows the arrogance of a man who has zero introspection or self-awareness.” Such was the anger over Wallace’s comments that even Downing Street got involved. An official spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the BBC that Wallace’s comments were “inappropriate and misogynistic” and that “It’s right that a thorough investigation is conducted.”
Finally, today, as the outcry continued to grow, Wallace was forced to make an apology. He backtracked, saying on his Instagram Stories, “I want to apologize for any offense that I caused with my post yesterday, and any upset I may have caused to a lot of people. I wasn’t in a good head space when I posted it…. It’s obvious to me I need to take some time out while this investigation is under way. I hope you understand and I do hope that you will accept this apology.” However, it seems pretty unlikely that women will. The whole incident has served to remind them of their own inappropriate bosses and colleagues, and the fact that even in a post-Me Too word some men belittle women and get away with it for far too long.
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