As John Torode and Gregg Wallace both leave Masterchef under a cloud, Fleet Street Fox asks when middle-aged men are going to get the message that times have changed
Middle-age is a glorious thing, for a woman. You stop giving a damn, and start taking names and kicking butt.
But for a man it’s a sea of insecurity, as strength recedes even faster than hairlines, and ego seems to expand in direct proportion to waistline.
And so it was for John Torode and Gregg Wallace, the Masterchef narcissists who made a fortune from telling other people they were doing it wrong while revelling in their own inability to understand there were other ways of doing things.
Personally I loathe cooking shows. The insistence on perfection, pressure and sneers reek a little too much of school, and the presenters remind me of the more vicious editors. Who cares about a soggy bottom, when custard exists and the so-called-expert’s arse resembles a collapsed souffle?
Every industry is filled with men over 40 who think they’re untouchable, but everyone else can be groped. The ones with glamour attached to their grimness – the moguls, the politicians, the TV types – are the ones who have been allowed to do it the longest, and the last to catch on to the fact that particular goose is cooked, now.
Wallace was fired after middle-class women of a certain age – see intro for details – pointed out their discomfort, and the oven door was opened on a bubbling gravy of complaints from younger, less-powerful women who’d been gently steaming for years. Torode went after a single complaint about using “the worst racial slur”, reportedly singing a Kanye West lyric at after-show drinks.
Presumably, he misunderstood “wrap party”. If only he’d brought fajitas instead.
Both men have been ardent in their denials. Wallace has blamed it on being both a cheeky greengrocer and autistic, while Torode can’t remember a damned thing. And here’s where the bananas split – a younger man would simply have said ‘sorry’.
READ MORE: John Torode to take legal action against BBC after MasterChef sacking
A younger man has bravado, but less ego. He has such great dollops of testosterone that he is fully aware there are few, if any, undernotes of thinking things through in any of his actions. But whisk him through a patriarchy for 30-odd years, earning more, drinking more, strutting more, getting patted on the back more, and you’ll wind up with a rancid old turkey still pretending it’s a spring chicken.
Many males of the species mature well, especially if you hang them in the shed to drip-dry. The very few who go rotten rather stink the place out, and although there are fewer of them in a more thoughtful, equal world, the stench is more easily-spotted as a result.
Men like Torode and Wallace perform the same function in society as the most hapless contestant on a cookery programme, there to be the butt of jokes and the example of what not to do. It adds to the gaiety of the nation to see ginormous prats brought low, and in this it must be said that the combined efforts of TV executives and ‘talent’ have been a crimes-against-taste showstopper.
But what’s that? Ding-ding, contestants, time’s up, and if you haven’t managed to figure out how to do this by now you never will. Present your achievements for our perusal: ah, it seems you’ve taken your trousers down in front of junior colleagues and said the N-word. In what world did you think that made you a winner?
The sight of Torode and Wallace, so pally when paid to be, each standing silently by as the other is skewered adds a certain flavour, but viewers must be hoping that the execs can dish up replacements who can make us forget the disastrous service we’ve seen so far. Diane Abbott is available but not always in-season, Meghan Markle would bring bland Californian positivity, or perhaps they’ll take an anti-woke political stance, and appoint a newly-minted teenaged voter in a Union Jack dress.
Whichever way Masterchef goes with the menu, you can guarantee it won’t include middle-aged white men of whom, frankly, the world has had its fill. The social befuddlement which garnishes their – shall we say – accidents in the kitchen is no longer enticing customers. Les enfants terribles are now merely terrible, and it’s time someone put a lid on them.
Cooking isn’t supposed to be perfect, but it does need to be edible. That hasn’t changed since the days of Mrs Beeton, who would have taken a frying pan to Wallace and Torode without a second thought. Now there’s an idea: a middle-aged woman, judging last-minute pasta and impossible-ask birthday cakes made of rainbows. Even I’d watch that.