Just why IS John Torode holding so quiet? TV insiders reveal fact about his and Gregg Wallace’s ‘friendship’ to KATIE HIND, and inform what was actually taking place on MasterChef set

Over the last two days there has been a queue of people coming forward to share their tales of humiliation, bullying and downright rudeness at the hands of Gregg Wallace.

Everyone from Kirsty Wark and Sir Rod Stewart, to Aggie MacKenzie and Ulrika Jonsson has been recalling how his particular brand of ‘humour’ caused outrage and upset.

There have been tales of trousers dropped, sexual innuendos aplenty and unpleasant behaviour spanning almost 20 years from the 60-year-old MasterChef host.

He even managed to upset Gogglebox star Kate Bottley, a Church of England vicar, who appeared on the show in 2017, I can exclusively reveal.

It emerged last night that a former staff member has claimed Wallace made ‘racist’ and ‘offensive’ Asian remarks about a contestant on set in 2017.

But there’s one person who’s been saying the most – with his silence. And that’s his sidekick, John Torode.

The Australian chef, who made his name on ITV‘s This Morning before MasterChef came calling, has been at Wallace’s side on the embattled BBC show for almost two decades, which translates to thousands of hours in his company.

Yet he is still to break his silence on the scandal, which resulted in Wallace, a notoriously plain-speaking, Peckham-born former greengrocer and barrow boy, stepping down from the show this week.

When asked by the Mail yesterday whether he had witnessed any of Wallace’s alleged tawdry behaviour or raised his concerns with bosses, Torode did not respond.

Now industry bosses are wanting to know what did he see and crucially, what, if anything, he plans to do next.

Another forum where his silence has been speaking a thousand words is Instagram, where Torode – normally a prolific user – hasn’t made a single mention of Wallace since June.

Indeed, one has to wonder whether Torode saw Wallace’s downfall coming down the tracks. It has been an open secret in the media for some months that journalists were investigating the latter’s on-set behaviour as rumours percolated throughout the television industry that Wallace was something of a ‘wrong-un’.

That might explain why Torode has been carefully distancing himself from Wallace as he plots his next move.

One source familiar with the MasterChef scandal reveals: ‘Gregg and John are not friends, their relationship has been purely professional for a long time but that is looking shaky right now.

‘John is actually much more of a sensitive soul but the fact is that he was present in the studios while MasterChef was being filmed so you have to wonder what he saw, what did he know?

‘John and Gregg filmed together when there has clearly been so much going on.

‘You expect John is absolutely terrified of being dragged into this. The last thing anyone would want is for his brand to be tarnished too, he is seen as the more sensible one who keeps things together while there have been so many whisperings about Gregg.’

In recent months Torode has been flooding his Instagram with cookery videos of himself and his much-loved wife of five years, Lisa Faulkner, making everyone wonder if he is lining her up as a replacement.

A MasterChef star herself, after winning the celebrity version of the show in 2010, she and Torode share videos of their work from their ITV cookery programme John And Lisa’s Weekend Kitchen with his 230,000 followers.

No one could argue she’d make an excellent swap – not to mention a much better behaved one.

The last time Torode mentioned Wallace was on June 30 when he posted a photograph of the pair of them on a flag which was being flown at Glastonbury. Five weeks before that, Torode posted about the Celebrity MasterChef final.

Meanwhile, model-turned-actress Lisa, 52, who married Torode in October 2019 at Aynhoe Park, Oxfordshire, is a welcome distraction from the fallout which threatens the future of the much-loved MasterChef.

‘Lisa is adored by viewers and television bosses,’ said one showbusiness insider. ‘She is very, very good for John’s brand and there is no doubt that showing himself with her is helping him and therefore MasterChef.

‘They’ve got a show on ITV which is popular, maybe next she will be snapped up by MasterChef, if it survives, to replace Gregg.’

It is, I’m told, something that has been discussed in recent days though of course production firm Banijay and the BBC will not be able to make a decision on Wallace’s future until the investigation is finished.

While Torode, 59, is keeping schtum on Wallace matters, Lisa has not been so discreet. In fact, she was ahead of the curve when she spoke at the Cheltenham Literary Festival last year where she discussed quite openly Wallace’s penchant for being rude on set.

‘Gregg was telling – I’m probably not allowed to say this,’ she told the audience. ‘Gregg just told rude joke after rude joke to the crew.

‘You’re just sitting there and if you’re on the front bench just chopping away thinking, ‘I’ve got ten minutes left,’ and he’s saying, ‘So this girl walked into a bar…’

‘And I’m going, ‘Please I don’t want to hear this joke’.’ Torode, who was present and appeared perplexed at his wife’s outburst, awkwardly chimed in to defend his co-star, saying: ‘It’s changed quite a lot really…’

It was quite the defence considering Wallace and Torode have not always enjoyed an easy relationship. In fact, away from the cameras, the word ‘tumultuous’ has been the word used many times to describe things between them.

Though Torode was Wallace’s best man for his fourth marriage, to Anne-Marie Sterpini – 22 years his junior – in 2016, the pair are anything but close. Speaking in 2017, Torode stunned MasterChef fans by saying: ‘It’s funny, we’ve never been friends. We’ve not been to each other’s houses.’

Even when travelling abroad for work, the two have always kept their distance, avoiding each other at mealtimes.

‘If we go away to somewhere like South Africa, we do things separately… if we do go out for a drink, I’ll invariably be at one end of a big old table and he’ll be at the other,’ he added. And when the two do come together, things don’t always play out as smoothly as they appear on camera, as Torode previously admitted to booze-fuelled spats with his co-host in the past.

‘Once, we had a bit too much to drink and filming got called off,’ he admitted referring to a particularly vicious disagreement on set.

A source who knows both men said: ‘It is a miracle that they stand next to one another on set sometimes, there have been some really, really bad times.

‘But John has stood by Gregg a lot over the years.’

Until now, perhaps. Because on Thursday it emerged that Wallace had been forced to step away from MasterChef amid allegations of sexually inappropriate behaviour.

He had ‘stepped down’ after 13 people, including former Newsnight presenter Wark, came forward to accuse him of inappropriate sexual comments over a 17-year period from 2005 to 2022.

Wallace has been accused of taking his top off in front of a female worker of the BBC cookery show, saying he wanted to ‘give her a fashion show’, made ‘sexualised’ jokes, and asked for massages.

On another occasion he allegedly told a junior female colleague he wasn’t wearing any boxer shorts under his jeans. His lawyers said it is entirely false that he engages in behaviour of a sexually harassing nature.

It has also emerged Wallace was formally warned by the BBC about his behaviour in 2018, but was allowed to return to the screen, raising further questions about the judgment of Corporation bosses.

Friends have suggested his inappropriate behaviour may be due to undiagnosed autism.

Wark, 69, who took part in Celebrity MasterChef in 2011, told BBC News that during filming Wallace told stories and jokes of a ‘sexualised’ nature in the company of contestants and crew which she felt were ‘really, really in the wrong place’.

Wallace was last night dropped as an ambassador for the children’s charity Ambitious About Autism. The organisation said it is ‘no longer working with’ the TV host ‘in light of recent allegations’.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph reported that a former member of the MasterChef production team has claimed Wallace imitated a sex act, holding her head and thrusting his body towards hers, as she knelt down in front of him while cleaning a mark off his trousers.

On another occasion Wallace is said to have walked into the studio ‘completely naked except for [a] sock pulled over his penis’ before doing a ‘silly dance’.

The allegations have opened the floodgates and in the last 48 hours a number of high-profile women have come forward to complain about Wallace who is becoming increasingly under siege as every minute goes by.

Aggie MacKenzie said Wallace ‘behaved like a sort of Sid James character’ who made ‘stupid, unfunny jokes that people kind of had to tolerate’ while reality television personality Charlotte Crosby branded him ‘extremely unpleasant.’ Radio presenter Aasmah Mir, also a MasterChef contestant, shared a cryptic tweet after Wallace left the show yesterday which said ‘keep hold of your receipts.’

And then footage of him telling comic Katy Brand ‘I’ll munch the living daylights out of your little tart’ emerged. Then there is Sir Rod’s sensational accusation that Wallace humiliated his wife Penny Lancaster when she appeared on Celebrity MasterChef in 2021.

Ulrika Jonsson was left horrified by her stint on the show, revealing yesterday Wallace cried after being reprimanded for making a ‘rape joke’ that left a female contestant ‘really distressed’ and caused another person to storm off set and complain to bosses.

‘They then went off to speak to Gregg. After a while he came up…and he apologised. He could hardly get his words out. He was apologising, and he had tears in his eyes’, she said.

But she added: ‘The apology should have been to everyone. It felt like, you know, ‘don’t make the joke in the first place’ and said she ‘definitely’ felt uncomfortable on set afterwards.

And today, the Mail can reveal that it was Kate Bottley who made the complaint.

‘She was bloody horrified,’ said a show source. ‘It was a disgrace and there was no way that she, as a Reverend, could stand back and let things like that be said.’

What will baffle all of those on the receiving end of Wallace’s alleged insults though is just why the BBC – or production company Banijay – didn’t take more robust action before.

There were red flags everywhere, it seems.

In fact, a letter handed to me yesterday from online pressure group ‘s**tmenintvhavesaidtome’ spelled out how they had written to the Corporation’s HR department two years ago to warn them about Wallace’s behaviour.

In it was one allegation that Wallace had asked for personal phone numbers of women working on the set while he is also accused of making comments about a female’s ‘a***.’

Incidents of angry outbursts were also raised, and apparently caught on camera, yet BBC bosses refused to engage.

‘It is literally impossible to believe that the severity of Gregg’s behaviour wasn’t known to both the BBC and Banijay now,’ said one source involved in the scandal.

‘Now they need to tell us why they didn’t act.’