A Scots broadcaster has claimed she can no longer watch MasterChef after Gregg Wallace made “inappropriate comments” towards her on the show.
Aasmah Mir, 53, has joined the growing number of women speaking out against the prominent host. It comes in the wake of the TV presenter stepping away from hosting hit BBC show MasterChef while a review into complaints is carried out.
The cooking programme’s production company Banijay UK said on Thursday that the BBC had received complaints from individuals in relation to “historical allegations of misconduct” while working with Wallace. He has denied all accusations that he has acted inappropriately towards females while working on various shows.
Now Glasgow-born Mir has spoken out about her experiences with Wallace when she appeared on the 12th series of Celebrity MasterChef. The Times Radio breakfast host was then a presenter on the BBC Radio 4 programme Saturday Live when she filmed in March 2017.
She was joined on the show by Ulrika Jonsson and opera singer Lesley Garratt and said that she was so shaken by Wallace’s actions that she can no longer watch MasterChef. She told the Times that when she presented her first dish to the judges, Wallace mentioned a mutual friend at Radio 4 and said: “Tell her from me, she’s a sexy b****.”
Mir said: “He did it brazenly in front of everybody. He obviously knew that he could say anything he wanted and he would get away with it? My major takeaway is that he felt able to say [a sexist comment] in front of a camera crew and nobody flinched, no one said anything.”
She was the first celebrity to be voted off and heard from two separate sources that Wallace had said to another female celebrity, who was squeamish about handling raw fish: “Watching you try to touch a fish is like watching a r***** do foreplay.” Another female contestant is understood to have walked off, appalled by the comment, and the production team raised it with Wallace, who apologised.
It soured the broadcaster’s experience on the show as she said: “I was really looking forward to doing something other than looking after a baby. I went home and thought, ‘that thing he said was really bad’, but I thought it would look like sour grapes if I complained because I was first out. So I left it for about five months, and then, when it was about to air on TV, I sent an email [to a Banijay executive] because I thought I must say something.”
Her report was logged in 2017 with Wallace allegedly warned by BBC bosses and producers about his behaviour. But it allegedly continued on for a number of years before he finally stepped down earlier this week.
Mir added: “I’ve not watched MasterChef since, because of him. To make someone feel that uncomfortable, or not to know that you’re making someone that uncomfortable – why would I want to watch someone like that? And they give you an apron and a MasterChef book and they went in the bin, because I didn’t want to be reminded of it.
“I said to a couple of people [in the wider media industry] afterwards, why is he allowed to get away with it?’. And they said: because he has a particular USP for the BBC, he probably does well in focus groups because he’s working class and he can communicate.
“He’s a no-nonsense greengrocer, so obviously he had some star power, and the BBC just didn’t want to mess with the format. It’s the same thing over Strictly: it’s like the crown jewels, isn’t it?”
Wallace received another warning from BBC bosses in 2018 after a complaint was raised about his behaviour on the quiz Impossible Celebrities. Earlier this week, presenter Kirsty Wark told BBC News that he told stories and jokes of a “sexualised nature” when she was a Celebrity Masterchef contestant in 2011.
Rod Stewart claimed Wallace had “humiliated” his wife, Penny Lancaster, on the show in 2021. The presenter has rejected suggestions he had been sexually inappropriate in a video posted on his Instagram.
He said: “Apparently now, I’m reading in the paper, there’s been 13 complaints in that time. 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.”
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