Gregg Wallace’s Christmas specials of MasterChef have been canned [BBC]

THE awful Gregg Wallace has been in the news, you may have noticed.

Every time you fired up social media this week you saw somebody’s opinion on the list of complaints made about the MasterChef host by female guests who were, allegedly, over many years made to feel awful by his lewd sexual innuendo.

Watch one clip of him saying something creepy before cramming his face with beautifully seared scallops – it’s always scallops – meant the web’s flytrap algorithm assumed you wanted to see more and more… Gregg Wallace.

More scallops, more Wallace.

These online contributions included an extraordinary one from the accused kitchen devil himself, who blamed the heat on “women of a certain age” – a comment he eventually realised needed an apology.

You’ll already be bored of this recap, given the wall-to-wall coverage of an ever-lengthening collection of wincing anecdotes and the apparent casual approach to dealing with anyone’s complaints.

Harrington should declare that I was never a fan of the fella, unlike presumably everybody who responds to the BBC market research conducted to see what’s working well for its channels at prime time.

Somewhere, as fantastical as this sounds, focus groups must be telling people with clipboards that what they really want to watch is more programmes with Gregg Wallace dropping his legendary banterbombs.

Who knows, but it does seem seeing less and less Gregg Wallace might be preferable and healthier for us all right now.

Martin Forde KC at City Hall this week

That was until a little snatch of conversation at the London Assembly this week, which led to the conclusion that we should all keep on talking about him for a lot longer still.

Martin Forde KC, who is heading a review of the culture change needed in the London Fire Brigade after reports found racism, misogyny and all the rest was rife within its walls, said the fact that young people were discussing the claims about Wallace was a good thing.

He’d been asked how long we’d have to wait for change during an appearance at City Hall on Tuesday.

“On the glacial rate of female judges, I think [Lord] Jonathan Sumption said it would take another 101 years,” he said, depressingly, about his own field.

“We should be at 51/49 like the rest of society as far as the bench is concerned, at all levels.”

But he added: “I do feel some hope among the younger cohort. I think they will have been brought up for longer with unacceptable views being exposed.”

Mr Forde KC is a rather suave, polite barrister and did not mention Wallace by name.

Instead, he said: “I think it’s no bad thing, for the gentleman who is in difficulty at the moment, for children to be reading about that.

“You’ve got to get away from the idea that certain things can be disguised as banter or, you know, laddish geezer behaviour. It’s unacceptable.”

Mr Forde KC comes across as a thoughtful man, who you may remember was commissioned by Sir Keir Starmer to review what was going on behind the scenes in the Labour Party only for his final report to drift into the Arctic after its difficult findings. He had reported that anti-Semitism had been “weaponised” by both sides of a factional divide, a lack of interest in Afriphobia and shocking details of how Hackney MP Diane Abbott had been the subject of abuse by staff in their message chains.

He might be more famous than he is beyond legal circles if his report had been given more airtime and opened up to wider discussion among prominent Labour figures.

The protests in response to his work held outside the party’s conference in Liverpool by black members were hardly covered in the nationals.

But now he’s helping to change the culture in the brigade – which has spent years on good comms work telling people to say firefighter not fireman, including Fireman Sam; perhaps without realising some of the worst prejudice was happening in its own stations.

To avoid any more Wallacing in the fire service but also any organisation, he suggests better training, questions to people when they are at a job interviews and messages constantly conveyed to staff, not just in biannual tickbox training sessions.

Keep talking about it, then, seems worthy advice. More scallops.