Handfuls of men of a certain age

(whose own hands are full of cash)

Whatever has become of Gregg Wallace? I had gone to all that trouble to find out who he was and what he had said to have caused such a rumpus and now he’s upped and disappeared without trace.

I have an aversion to cookery programmes and I never watch anything with the word ‘celebrity’ in its title so I was ignorant of the existence of Mr Wallace who, I came to understand, is a ‘celebrity chef’.

‘It is entirely false that he engages in behaviour of a sexually harassing nature,’ spat out Gregg Wallace’s legal team before the row had even got started and giving even more credibility, in their blanket denial, to those women who complain they are not listened to.

While women are preparing Sunday lunch, clearing up after a week of work and school and preparing for the week to come, everyone else, it seems, is watching men showing them how to cook. With the help of Google, Wikipedia and a site called ‘Net Worth’ I did some investigations and learned a bit not only about these celebrity men and their assets but also about the BBC and its priorities.

‘No-one has ever complained’, Wallace declared and the complaints began to come in.

Denial is the go-to response to any accusation but it can’t last. At some point the Great Denier will have to eat his words and resign.

But Gregg had more words to spill before he ate them.

The first defence may be denial but the best defence is attack. Gregg attacked. The complaints he said in what would become a classic in the annals of misogyny, had come ‘only from a handful of women of a certain age’.

Which women? Whose handful? What size was it? And what was the ‘certain age’?

One Sunday morning I turned on the television and investigated. I didn’t find anything about the women, not even their names, though some did turn up later. I did, though, find stuff about a lot of men of a certain age.

The BBC’s ‘celebrity chef’, Nigel Slater (68) was worth: £397,572,722.00. Another estimate gave the figure as £100,000 more than that and of course all such estimates cannot be taken at face value, quite apart from the fact that that kind of money is making huge amounts more money for itself by doing nothing.

Obviously one is never going to find accurate financial figures on the Net and Net Worth says of another of the BBC’s cohort of ‘celebrity chefs’, ‘There isn't much information about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's net worth right now.’

As it happened Hugh Fearnley Wittingstall (60) was talking that Sunday morning about the fracas involving that other ‘celebrity chef’, Gregg Wallace, and doing a careful job of hedging his bets. You don’t want to get thrown off the Cordon Bleu gravy train.

Our democracy is obsessed with hierarchies. You can no longer find a common or garden model; they are all ‘super models’. (Even Twiggy was never a super model; she was just like the rest of us only thinner and with bigger eyes). There are no longer any run of the mill cooks, they are all ‘celebrity chefs’.

The trouble with Gregg (you must not commit the sin of omitting any of the Gs) was that he not only responded aggressively and foolishly through his lawyers but he also couldn’t resist getting involved himself. Did he really believe he could silence all criticism by simply stating, several times on social media before 7 am, that everything everyone said about him was all lies?

Only a few people can get away with insisting they are the greatest. Muhammed Ali managed it with humour and even humility but for the rest of us we become merely the emperor in his new clothes and our refusal to listen to any dissent leaves us laughing stocks in our nakedness and delusion.

And then Gregg capped all the bluster and denial by issuing another statement. The complaints, he stated, had come only from ‘a handful of women of a certain age’. It was a quote for the annals of feminism and could take its place along with ‘a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle’ and ‘women have no idea how much men hate them’, etc. Gregg with three Gs and a wife (the fourth) fifteen years his junior, was a sexist, perhaps even a misogynist, but he wasn’t going to attack you with a sledge hammer. He was not a serious threat; nothing more than a joke.

I flicked through all the channels I could get (I have a lousy aerial): BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV, Channel 4, Sky: every single one of them featured a man. And not just any old man. A quite specific man: they were all of a certain age, some were balding, all were wealthy.

Some were in charge of their own programmes; some were guests on the programmes of other hosts who looked just like them. It was like a chain letter looping round the airways.

Every Friday evening back in the fifties and sixties my mum listened to Any Questions. ‘Why are there never any women?’ she would complain. Nobody even attempted an answer. It was like the weather: you couldn’t change it, the most you could do was moan about it.

The weather is still the same. And so is the media. Even the token women who once appeared on shows dominated by men have been dispensed with.

All that has changed is the fact that the hosts are now known as ‘celebrities’ and make huge amounts of money.

One of the men of a certain age that Sunday morning was the youthful Alexander Armstrong, (54). In fact, he was on two channels at the same time. He was somewhere in some Eastern country looking at stuff in a market and simultaneously on a gardening programme as a guest of Alan Titchmarsh (75).

Alan Titchmarsh's estimated worth, according to my researches, was in 2021 ‘approximately £10-15 million’. Looks like a decent income and he is not even a celebrity. He is only listed on ‘Net Worth’ not on ‘Celebrity Net Worth’ unlike his guest, Alexander Armstrong, who has ‘built a fortune of around £3.6 million’ which is, I imagine, a massive under-estimate. Anyone making that kind of money would be a fool not to employ financial advisers to massage the figures and PR people to filter things for the public.

Armstrong belongs to the aristocracy of tv. He has handled his PR well. When the journalist, Carrie Gracie returned to the UK to fill her high ranking post at the Beeb after her time reporting in China, she was shocked to find that she was paid considerably less than men of her standing and for a moment the Beeb got defensive.

But, rather than sort out the issue and pay women properly, the BBC, pleading its own poverty despite the rocketing licence fee, suggested some of the highly paid men should forfeit a fraction of their earnings. Great PR for those chaps in need of Brownie points and Alexander Armstrong took it on. It worked well for him: whenever I see him on television my heart involuntarily melts as it identifies him not with a calculated fiscal manoeuvre but with generosity and self-denial. Such a nice man!

Like many women Gracie rose to the challenge life had thrown at her by trying to improve the lot of other women too. But the BBC had no intention of responding to the issue with any serious intentions and in no time Gracie had resigned, accusing the corporation of ‘throwing money at her’ instead of explaining why she was earning less than her male colleagues and tackling the discrimination in its system. She passed the money the Beeb had given her to charity and resigned.

The BBC knew, of course, that all it had to do was wait for the whole thing to blow over and ensure that it never again employed women in high-ranking positions.

This is not to say there are no women on television. The women who appear on ‘celebrity’ programmes are not the hosts; the hosts are invariably male (at least in my survey). But women are needed and they do have a place. Just as they have always been the stooges on comedy shows and the helpmeets on panel shows, so they can be the contestants on quiz shows. They are even allowed to win. This, then, surely, is where women make money from television.

But no. There is one important stipulation: the contestants cannot make money for themselves, but only for charity. So, while the contestants are busy raising money for charity, their hosts are raising it for themselves. While the contestants are women and some men, the hosts are all men.

(Like, for instance, Stephen Mulhern (47) (net worth ‘around £5 million’)

I was still Sunday morning channel-surfing but I hadn’t come across a single woman. Not one. Not even Laura Kuenssberg (48) (325,000 pa).

I arrived at ‘Sunday Brunch’ on Channel 4. Like so many of such programmes, it shows not one but two bald men of a certain age. One was Tim Lovejoy (56) and the other was Simon Rimmer (61).

Two men instead of one has been a familiar format for some time on the radio and on podcasts (where Alistair Campbell (67) and Rory Stewart (52) with their rather ordinary chats about this and that are kings) and I learned in my enquiries that Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman (54) (net worth £3-4 million) are to once again appear together, hosting Catchphrase. Pay? Try asking the BBC and while you are at it, ask about the licence fee and the old people who no longer get it subsidised. The BBC spends about £137million collecting it each year.

On ‘Sunday Brunch’ a row of people were eating at a table. There were four men who looked much like all the men on all the programmes I had already seen. Some were balding, all were of a certain age. But of the three women, the first women I had come across on my travel through Sunday morning television, all were under the age of 40,

I continued surfing, flitting past ‘Children’s Task Master’ where a precocious boy was learning the essential practice of man-spreading while mansplaining.

Then I came to a show where two men were on a sofa with a very young woman in an off-the-shoulder dress, despite the fact that it was midwinter and the breakfast hour. She was talking about being the only girl in a band. Nobody mentioned that she was also the only girl on this show. Perhaps the only girl on British tv at this moment.

But it wasn’t the girl who was moaning about being alone; it was poor dear Gregg with 3Gs! He had been through the Denial Stage and the Defence/Attack stage and was now onto the Self-Pity stage explaining why we should go on loving him despite his rude and aggressive tweets. He seemed to be inviting the complaints to come in. And come in, they did, culminating in a tweet from Rod Stewart, (now on his fifth or maybe his sixth (blond) wife).

‘You humiliated my wife when she was on the show,’ he said. ‘You’re a tubby bald-headed, ill-mannered bully’. And he added, ‘Karma got ya.’

When I first heard Gregg’s attack on ‘women of a certain age’, I racked my brains to think of any. The only one who came to mind was Mary Whitehouse whose campaigns against moral decline especially on the BBC brought lots of attention and debate back in the 1960s and 70s. She was one woman alone speaking her truth and she was ridiculed and side-lined mercilessly. These days you can find her on Wikipedia where women amount to a grand total of 19% of the entries.

Here is a quote from it showing her isolation in the subjects she was tackling:

‘Her subsequent petition against paedophilia and child pornography was signed by 1+¹⁄₂ million people.^[91] Whitehouse urged the Conservative opposition to push for a bill on the subject, in the absence of interest from the Labour government. The private member's bill proposed by Conservative MP Cyril Townsend became the Protection of Children Act 1978.^[91] ‘

While the young woman on the telly was alone on the sofa in her off the shoulder dress (and I was shivering just looking at her), it was Gregg who deserved the pity.

‘I felt very alone under siege when I posted it’, he said to excuse his indefensible tweeted remarks about women.

He still hadn’t learned that if you are at the top of your game you should let your lawyers and PR people get on with doing the work for you while you sit back in dignified silence.

‘I wasn’t in a good headspace when I posted it,’ he explained.

Poor dear Gregg with 3Gs! Blatantly manipulating the audience! But even if anyone sees it, do they care?

The problem is, these guys are in our sitting rooms frequently, some of them even daily. Inevitably we get fond of them and feel that we know them. When they do well we celebrate with them, when they make a mess we feel sorry for them. We let them get away with stuff just as we would members of our own families.

They get away even with criminal acts in plain sight because we collectively forgive them and give them a free pass.

It takes a lot to get them to stand down. Their colleagues in the media gather round to support and protect them and the public continues to love them. Eventually they have to go but they hold on as long as they can.

I was still watching Sunday morning tv but the hour of the celebrity chef was passing and giving way to the hour of the builder and the property owner.

Two men were presenting ‘The Property Ladder’, in ‘Homes under the Hammer’….

I switched over to ‘Highway Cops’ featuring Jamie Theakston (54) (net worth $8 million) and handed my partner the remote. ‘It’s all yours,’ I said and left the room. How lucky we are to have more than one room! And only one tv!

When I came back later, the hosts had got younger. We had moved from the average age of 60-something to the fifties and we had already passed through the fixing and repairing programmes with their hosts like Jay Blades (54) (net worth estimated at £2,383,695) and would soon be launched on the endless programmes about antiques with the likes of Drew Pritchard (‘about 54’) (£9 million).

(Meanwhile, the rest of television continued remorselessly and the hosts went on making vast amounts of money: over on ITV Ant and Dec, for instance, each 49, are ‘worth something like £62 million each’, surely an underestimate!)

I had come back to the telly for a purpose. I wanted to see Jean Hatchet. I had come across her on X. There was no chance I would ever find her on mainstream media. She is articulate, good looking and self-possessed. Her main drawback is that she doesn’t have blond hair and she isn’t under 40.

There is another problem with Jean Hatchet that prevents her ever appearing on mainstream tv: she is ‘gender critical’, and speaks out about the infiltration of female sports by men. She is, therefore, boycotted by the BBC which never ever ever wobbles on it stance on ‘trans rights’ i.e. male supremacy. But Talk TV had granted her the chance to speak.

This was a once in a lifetime opportunity to see a woman talk on television about a subject that is having a huge impact on women: men pretending to be women and blatantly stealing from them with the implicit approval of the whole society.

But the programme was disappointing: the same old format: two men, but in this case you could at least differentiate them since one was bearded. They were sitting together in a studio. One of them was James Whale (73) (5 million dollars) who, I later learned, had not so long ago been suspended from broadcasting for laughing at his guest when she talked about having been raped.

That guest, Nichi Hodgson, herself a journalist, has said she was ‘interrogated, ridiculed and had [her] journalistic integrity questioned’.

The two men went on sitting in their studio talking in a bored, cynical way about very little. It was as if they were deliberately making their female guest wait. Time passed. Eventually Jean Hatchet came on. She was not in the studio with the bros but in another place, on another screen. She went on waiting with a kind smile on her face, while the men continued as if she wasn‘t there. It was so rude it was painful to watch. But Jean was unbelievably patient.

As patient as the host was rude: patronising, dismissive, uninterested.

Jean has not only worked to keep women’s sports free of men but has taken on the plight of women in Afghanistan who, of course, are not permitted to play any sport at all and are not allowed in public parks (a system of apartheid that recalls not only South Africa but also Nazi Germany, and which effectively bans children from their own play areas).

Jean is outspoken about the Taliban and campaigns for our male cricket team to refuse to play in the upcoming match against Afghanistan. For this, she has, of course, been subjected to the usual threats of violence and abuse online while the test match team continues to ignore and dismiss her.

A letter, signed by more than 160 British politicians, urged England's men's team to ‘speak out against the horrific treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan under the Taliban’.

The cricketers responded by saying that the matter required a ‘co-ordinated, ICC-led, response’ rather than unilateral action from individual countries while Keir Starmer and his sport and culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, said that to boycott the match would be ‘counterproductive’.

For whom would it be counter-productive? For the cricketers presumably. I doubt if the women of Afghanistan would see it that way. Things could hardly get worse for them.