My mate Gregg has a mouth like Bernard Manning – but he’s a top bloke

John Torode, William Sitwell and Gregg Wallace
Whenever I drop in on Gregg at the MasterChef set, the welcome is always warm - Shine TV

The greeting is always exuberant, always loud, always warm. “Mate!”, cries Gregg Wallace as I make one of my occasional forays to the MasterChef set in east London. “Did I tell you about the time” and he’s off delivering an anecdote, or just a straightforward gag. In fact, so thick and fast come the jokes, the one-liners, the very short stories, that you could be forgiven for thinking he’s constantly rehearsing for a one-man show, a comedy tour.

But he’ll also invariably ask how I am – and when he asks, he means it.

“How are you mate?” isn’t just a pleasantry. As far as I’m concerned he’s always genuinely interested in the wellbeing of people around him. The health, the wealth, or otherwise, of those he works with, of his friends and very large circle of acquaintances. And he’s equally open about his own life, sometimes quite extraordinarily so.

He often talks of his son, Sid, who is autistic, his wife Anna and her Italian mother who lives with him in a sort of old-fashioned commune in Kent. He’s open about what his older kids, from one previous marriage (and there have been a few marriages) are up to, he’s open about the money he earns from the large number of TV shows he presents. And he’s open on set. He seems to engage with everyone, indeed the lower down the rankings – and TV is a notorious hierarchy – the more care and attention he gives.

So, as someone who has known him for a good 25 years I find the news of “inappropriate behaviour” startling to say the least. And in writing these words I ask myself, will I be what Jon Sopel was to Huw Edwards? In time, will stuff come out that makes me eat my words with as much disgust as I might splutter at the sad offerings of a failing contestant on the show that I have been a critic on for more than two decades?

Well, my hunch is it’s unlikely. The Gregg I know, who never stops talking, never stops reading, never stops filming, never stops speaking to his followers – he conducts a daily Instagram live at 7am every morning – is, for sure, inappropriate. When it comes to jokes, he fires them off like he’s running a Bernard Manning comedy workshop. Some are plain silly, others outrageous. Which, of course, is the point of jokes.

And the lad from Peckham, who having gained enormous TV and business success, dresses like a man who is proud of his roots and the distance, financially, that he has travelled. So he has built up a vast collection of suits, trousers, shirts and hats. And as I picture him now, on set, between takes in the MasterChef studio, I can almost see him swaggering about, hands on his lapels, doing his best Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Except of course that, as many of us painfully realised when he appeared on Strictly in 2014, if there’s one thing he can’t do, it’s dance.

“That was my most profitable TV appearance,” he once told me over breakfast in Soho, revealing the vast sum he trousered for an appearance that saw him being voted off first.

Yet move about that set he does, with energy and vim. He builds up relationships with contestants, there is palpable warmth and, off camera, his interest is not in what they cook, but what they do and who they are.

And his knowledge of food, built up over many years, first as a grocer, then as witness to what must be millions of dishes through MasterChef and the various programmes he has presented such as Inside the Factory, is of course impressive. As is his ability to dissect a dish, to understand its strengths, its flaws and to discern flavours, the role of spice, the marriage of ingredients. And rarely does he require a second take.

And then what is surprising, when we occasionally meet for breakfast or lunch, is that his conversation is rarely about food, and never about MasterChef. It’s about history. “I’m an amateur historian,” he says. He hoovers up detail and is fascinated by wars and monarchs, culture and class.

Interesting, funny, exhausting and outrageous, is the Gregg I know. I gather his colleagues at MasterChef and the production company are as astonished as I am about the news. And I’m sure we all hope this force of nature will be back on set sooner than you can say, as his catchphrase goes, “buttery biscuit base”.