Kmflett's Blog

After Torode & Wallace: Masterchef is a global TV brand

This week has seen the BBC sacking at arm’s length of Masterchef UK presenters John Torode and Gregg Wallace. They are in fact produced by Banijay a global production company. Wallace was sacked for being a Sexpest and Torode for making a racist comment (which he says he cant recall). BBC boss Tim Davie says it was the worst racist term that could be used but it seems unlikely Davie is an expert here. Richard Osman has broadly hinted what it was and it was entirely unacceptable but depending on who the remark was made to there are worse. In the world of culture wars and lawyers these matters resound.

The debate has focused on who might replace Wallace and Torode and whether an already filmed series with Wallace should be shown. For Banjay, beyond the parochial UK media, there may be global impacts.

Masterchef UK was relaunched in 2005 and is the original from which the format has been rolled out around the world (see link below). Australian Masterchef was the first to follow and still continues in a rather more frenetic, to my taste, format than the UK. The presenters were replaced in 2019 after issues, but the programme remains in production.

Why the French and Chinese versions didn’t work is perhaps of some interest. Not as much however as the notoriously parochial UK media (with some exceptions) failure to note that in 2025 the Masterchef brand really is not all about Torode and Wallace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MasterChef

And by the way the answer to future Wallace and Torodes is not just that the BBC gets a better grip on ‘talent’ (top paid stars) but listens to and encourages membership of a union- in this case BECTU. People should not be in fear of calling out sexist, racist or demeaning behaviours whoever is doing it.

RIP Dave Cousins of the Strawbs- still Part of the Union

Dave Cousins of the Strawbs died aged 85 on July 13^th.

Ironically the song the group are best known for, Part of the Union, which was not written or originally performed by Cousins, was not typical of the band’s repertoire.

Debate at the time focused on whether the song was a celebration of trade union power (in February 1974 Tory PM Heath called a General Election on the theme of who governs Britain, Westminster or the Unions. He lost the electorate expressing in favour of the latter and a Labour Government) or a send up of it.

The Strawbs subsequently claimed it was a pro-union song although at 50 plus years distance, while its expression of collective solidarity still rings true, the labour movement it describes now look very different in terms of gender, ethnicity and occupation.

Mark Crail of the Society for the Study of Labour History has written a useful summary of the songs place in history

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_of_the_Union

The end of Elon Musk’s White House bromance has been well documented but now Trump has thrown another far right figure, Nigel Farage under the bus.

Trump is due to make a State visit to Britain in September but will not get to address MPs as Parliament will be in recess.

Farage has been whining on about Parliament being recalled to allow Trump to address it.

However in an interview with the BBC Trump has said he is not bothered about this

Guardian Report 15th July 2025

Yesterday Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said (to GB News, of course) that parliament should be recalled so that Trump could get the chance to speak in the Royal Gallery or Westminster Hall (the venues normally used for these events).

But, when O’Donoghue asked Trump about this, he discovered that the US president doesn’t agree with Farage, and isn’t bothered about the prospect of not getting the President Macron treatment.

Asked if he would like parliament to be recalled so he could make a speech there, Trump replied:

I think let them go and have a good time [ie, let MPs have their recess].

Whoever does Farage’s social media hasn’t noticed Trump’s rebuff. Farage’s demand that Trump address Parliament was still up on Tuesday evening although the owner of Reform had of course moved on to other whinges

This weekend & the weather looks decent.

1834 is a year in British history that resonates still. The Tolpuddle Martyrs but also the Poor Law Amendment Act which set up the Workhouse. Its principle was work even for low pay in poor conditions or face even worse…

Wisden

14th July

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that England’s narrow win over India at Lords in the Third Test was a victory for Bazbeard.

A key difference between the closely matched sides was the England captain Ben Stokes had a beard while Indian captain Shubman Gil was clean shaven in an otherwise notably hirsute side.

However the key to English success lay in a further twist known to the BLF as Bazbeard.

England coach Brendan McCullum watched the match from the Lords balcony and could from time to time be seen tweaking his beard. The campaigners say that McCullum was sending tactical signals to Stoke who, as a fellow beard wearer, speaks the same hirsute strategic language, known as Bazbeard.

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

In recent weeks there has been much talk and publicity about a new left party. Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn are involved in discussions about how this can happen.

Much media commentary is around whether such a left party will work and whether it will be able to get votes.

Those few who glance at this blog from time to time will know that I am no fan of pollsters-psephologists- who often far from trying to report public opinion instead try to shape it. The relentless promotion of Reform is a recent example.

An exception is the veteran psephologist Sir John Curtice. He has over a sustained period recognised that there is a left of Labour electoral constituency that is worth keeping an eye on. He rightly questions in the piece above, which appeared in the Times recently, about whether a proposed new left political formation will work. However he concludes by noting that the Green vote which currently exists mean that Labour can no longer assume that an electoral challenge to its left is impossible.

Work in progress or not, but with a media obsessed by Nigel Farage, looking at what is happening on the left is an important corrective, perhaps not least for Morgan McSweeney

Attending the final of the football Club World Cup on Sunday Donald Trump was booed by sections of the crowd- supporters of Chelsea and PSG- during the playing of the US National Anthem.

The playing of the US anthem seemed rather out of place but it’s Trump’s US.

Its not the first time Trump has been booed by there is a long tradition of crowds booing unpopular politicians.

Historically, certainly dating back to the time the crowd becomes an actor on the stage of history in the mid eighteenth century, booing has been a way of showing collective protest at the rich and powerful.

But it hasn’t been just booing.

What the American historical sociologist Charles Tilly called the ‘repertoire’ of the crowd went far beyond booing.  It extended to hissing, groaning, hooting and pelting with missiles, often  rotten vegetables or fruit but sometimes stones as well.

The London crowd in particular was well known from the start of the modern era for robust reactions to those it didn’t like. When John Wilkes, who went on to become Mayor of London, announced his intention to stand for Parliament at Middlesex in the late 1760s one of his opponents on appearing at a Brentford hustings found himself ‘jeered and hissed’

At the State opening  of Parliament on 29^th October 1795, EP Thompson notes in the Making of the English Working Class,  the King was ‘hissed, hooted and his carriage pelted.. the King’s carriage window was fractured probably by a pebble’

Parson Woodforde recorded  that George 111 was ‘hissed, hooted and groaned at by vast crowds’.

After the formation of the Metropolitan Police the authorities began to attempt  to control unregulated street noises and two Acts of 1839 and 1841 aimed to ban all ‘uncommon noises’ from horn blowing to street cries.

The Acts were robustly enforced and their main provisions remain in force little amended today as anyone who has ever tried to organise or do anything on the street without telling the police will testify.

However the power of the crowd could overcome robust policing at any time.

In August 1842 the 3^rd Battalion Grenadier Guards were mobilised from their barracks at Charing Cross to march to Euston Station and then by train to the north-west to be used against strikers involved in the 1842 General Strike, sometimes called the Plug Plot.

Large crowds of protesters gathered as the troops marched through central London and what the historian of London Chartism David Goodway describes as ‘murmurs of groans and hisses’ began. These grew so loud that the troops fixed bayonets in an attempt to silence the crowd. They failed.

In more recent times such crowd reactions have sometimes been stage managed- as at a pantomime and sometimes at sporting events, but the point about their use at a live event or on the street is that they are essentially spontaneous and unpredictable indicators of popular feeling.

Gregg Walllace: remembrance of things past: the ‘amateur historian’

In a piece published in the Telegraph in February 2024, now former Master Chef and former Inside the Factory Host Greg Wallace detailed some of the activities of his week.

One was playing a computer game set in a Britain (or more accurately an England perhaps) of 878 AD. Wallace declares himself an ‘amateur historian’. Perhaps the comment is a little tongue in cheek, but it was picked up by the media.

Gregg Wallace said that he had overshared and was upset at the ridicule his daily routine had been subject to:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68227821

We shouldn’t sneer at amateur historians, whatever their interests.. Showing interest in any aspect of the past can add perspective and perhaps a degree of self-awareness too. Unfortunately in the case of Gregg Wallace it didn’t work.

Picture BBC

Eventually the final of the self styled Club World Cup took place on Sunday. Theoretically it was between Chelsea and PSG, although music, ad breaks, and celebs, seemed to be the key features of the evening.

Donald Trump, well known football fan (after all he once did an League Cup draw*) was in attendance with FIFA President Infantino.

Clearly there could be only one winner on the night and Trump scored the big beautiful goal and placed an emergency goal reduction tariff on Chelsea

• thanks to Peter Lucas for the correction