Gregg Wallace & the working class
On the BBC news site Gregg Wallace, who a report has found to have been responsible for a range of inappropriate behaviours and comments while hosting MasterChef for 2o odd years, is ‘very sorry’ about it all.
Head over to the Telegraph however and Gregg’s latest posting claims that ‘modern broadcasting has become a dangerous place for a working class man’.
There is of course no question that once, a long time ago, Gregg Wallace was working class, starting out as a greengrocer. He rose to have several businesses based on this, and while their fortunes were variable, it also launched into a broadcasting career and eventually to MasterChef.
Wallace was not employed by the BBC but by Banjay so his recent salary is not reported but the media suggests it was around £400,000 a year for MasterChef and related activities. He is also reported to have an overall wealth of £3.5m which may or may not accurate. We can conclude however that Wallace is reasonably well off and as Marx noted that is what determines his class not what he was decades ago.
Of course Wallace has adopted what he thinks are certain characteristics of a working class persona in the present day. A BBC report refers to this as ‘learnt behaviour’. No doubt there are some working class men that go on as Wallace did, based on the Banjay Report. There are also some middle and upper class men who behave in similar ways. But conversely there lots of working class men who do not think Gregg Wallace is the kind of role model or influencer they need to follow.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness
Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859
Leave a Reply