Gregg Wallace, the MBE-awarded MasterChef presenter who has become a staple in living rooms across the nation, announced today that he will be stepping away from his role on the hit BBC show while the channel investigates “historical allegations of misconduct”. This misconduct allegedly includes “sexually inappropriate jokes”.
Speaking on behalf of the 60-year-old south London-born chef, MasterChef's production company, Banijay, said in a statement: “This week the BBC received complaints from individuals in relation to historical allegations of misconduct while working with presenter Gregg Wallace on one of our shows.
“Whilst these complainants have not raised the allegations directly with our show producers or parent company Banijay UK, we feel that it is appropriate to conduct an immediate external review to fully and impartially investigate.
“While this review is under way, Gregg Wallace will be stepping away from his role on MasterChef and is committed to fully cooperating throughout the process.”
In the meantime, episodes of MasterChef: The Professionals which have already been filmed and include Wallace will continue to air.
Wallace was born in 1964 in Peckham, where he was raised by his mother, Mary Pettman, and his father, whose name is unknown. According to Wallace, “My parents broke up when I was young and I lost all direction.”
As part of this loss of direction, Wallace dropped out of school and failed to pursue his dream of completing a history degree. “Messing up the chance of higher education is an enormous regret,” he told the Daily Mail in 2011.
Wallace was sexually abused when he was a young boy, a piece of information he revealed in his 2012 autobiography, Life on a Plate. “I imagine my experience is typical,” Wallace later said while appearing on Loose Women. “You feel guilty, you feel like you’re playing some part in it – sorry I’m getting a bit emotional – and of course you haven’t.”
Comparing the abuse to children who are abused by their football coaches, Wallace said: “I wanted people to know because it happens because it’s people that you like and that you're close to - it's not someone standing in a mac in an alleyway. It's someone whose appearance to the rest of the world is that of a decent person. It’s an awful thing.”
After dropping out of school, Wallace started working at a warehouse aged 15, selling fruit and vegetables at Covent Garden Fruit and Veg Market. In his early 20s, Wallace set up his own business, George Allan's Greengrocers, which would go on to produce a turnover of £7.5 million.
In 2010, Wallace delved deeper into the food scene by opening the restaurant Wallace & Co in Putney, where he served as one of the directors. In 2012, he opened Gregg's Bar & Grill in a joint venture with the Bermondsey Square Hotel. Both ventures folded by 2014, but Wallace was already making notable progress in another field.
Wallace was selected to be the original presenter of Saturday Kitchen on BBC One when it started 2002, until he was later replaced by Antony Worrall Thompson in 2003.
But Wallace had already made a name for himself as a resident telly “Veg Man”, so a series of other gigs followed: Veg Out on the Discovery Channel, Follow That Tomato for The Food Channel and Veg Talk on BBC Radio 4.
In 2005, Wallace joined the cast of MasterChef alongside Aussie-British TV chef John Torode. The pair have starred ever since, marking a near 20-year commitment to the show. Wallace has appeared as a TV personality on other shows since, such as Strictly Come Dancing and Who Do You Think You Are?, but is known for his work on MasterChef above all else.
Meanwhile, Wallace’s romantic life has been far less straight forward. Wallace has been married four times and divorced three times, with his first marriage (to wife Christine in 1991) lasting just six weeks.
Wallace shares two children, Tom and Libby, with his second wife, Denise, a former pastry chef, who he married in 1999. Tom is now 30 years old and Libby is 27.
Wallace met his third wife, Heidi, in 2009. They married in 2010 but split after 15 months of marriage.
Finally, Wallace settled down with wife Anne-Marie Sterpini in 2013. 21 years his junior, Wallace met Sterpini via Twitter, and the pair tied the knot at a castle in Kent in 2016, with John Torode serving as Wallace’s best man.
Wallace and Sterpini welcomed their son, Sid, in 2019, a decision Wallace later told reporters that this was not “something that I would have chosen at my age" but did to please his wife.
Five-year-old Sid is autistic and non-verbal. Wallace recently came under fire for his rather hands-off parenting of Sid, following the publication of a day-in-the-life style interview called My Saturday for The Telegraph.
Wallace details how he wakes up at 5am but doesn’t appear to interact with his son until 1.30pm, then has his wife cook lunch for him and spends time playing historical computer games. He also explains how, in return for having a child with wife Anne-Marie Sterpini, he requested live-in childcare help, which comes in the form of Sterpini’s mother.
Public perception of Wallace has not been particularly fond since the publication of this article, which one Reddit user said “makes him sound like a psychopath”. Others noted that it reads very similarly to Blur’s Parklife.
Now, Wallace finds himself at the centre of a misconduct storm which the BBC say is entirely historical. According to BBC figures, Wallace was on a salary of £250,000 back in 2016 for his work on MasterChef, though his more recent wage is unknown.
This misconduct allegedly included sexually inappropriate jokes, according to fellow broadcaster Kirsty Wark. Wallace’s lawyers have said it is entirely false that he engages in sexually harassing behaviour.
A BBC spokesperson said: “We take any issues that are raised with us seriously and we have robust processes in place to deal with them.
“We are always clear that any behaviour which falls below the standards expected by the BBC will not be tolerated.
“Where an individual is contracted directly by an external production company we share any complaints or concerns with that company and we will always support them when addressing them.”
