Gregg Wallace is breaking records for the biggest hole dug by mankind

Times

6 days ago

Good day, dearest Times reader, and welcome to the week when the world of celebrity forced us to consider all the ramifications that occur when a long-term couple split up.
As everyone will be aware, there are a thousand difficult and complex negotiations to be made when a couple separate. Who will get the good kitchen knives? The dog? The Unseen Bean DVD? The division of material goods can become painful, but not as painful, of course, as the emotional division. We all know scenarios whereby couples have essentially had to debate who gets 'custody' of mutual friends. 'You can have Jeff and Alice, but I'm taking Jason and Paul — I need them for tennis' etc.
And so to Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom, six months ago one of the hottest A-list couples on the planet but now, as is the way, 'the most eligible single man in Hollywood' and 'poor, emotionally devastated, dried-up old spinster Katy Perry'. In happier times the Perry-Blooms were friends with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, one of the richest couples in the world. Since Perry and Bloom separated, however, it's been interesting how they divvied up this literally Prime relational real estate.
Two months in, it seems the deal was as follows: Perry got access to Jeff's $2.5 billion rocket and went into space. In return Orlando went to Jeff and Lauren's $56 million 'wedding of the century' in Venice, which brought the whole city to a halt. They then shared the Bezoses' honeymoon, on their $500 million yacht. I'm sure this is a useful template for many contemplating a forthcoming divorce. Once you see how you can divide a rocket trip into space, a $56 million wedding and $500 million yacht, it all becomes a lot easier.
As the Oasis reunion trundles on, I'm sure we've all become fretful over an unanswered question: when will Noel and Liam Gallagher's celebrity friends be invited to a huge party to celebrate this seismic cultural event? After all, has something really actually happened unless you've had the headline 'VIP here now'? Well, don't worry — on Monday The Sun had the answer: 'Oasis plan huge £200k party after Wembley shows, to celebrate success of first part of reunion tour with celeb pals', the headline roared.
Always one to pursue a solid example of just what words like 'huge' will actually consist of, I found the calculator app on my phone to see what £200,000 will get you at a London party. With the average London pint at £6.75, and gin and tonics at £7.24, £200,000 will get you 14,813 lagers, 13,811 G&Ts, 20 Marlboro Lights and bag of ready salted crisps. Which is exactly how I remember the Nineties.
• Oasis reunion review — still mad for it after all these years
At No 1 in Celebrity Watch two weeks ago, Drake continues to make the news, not least because last weekend he played three consecutive nights at Finsbury Park in north London, which I could hear very clearly from my back garden, and which really seemed to distress the dog when all the pyrotechnics went off during his version of Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You.
Another trend Mr Drake appears to be continuing is to be, in the words of the younger generation, 'a bit moist'. 'Moist' is the 21st-century update of 'wet': someone who keeps doing things they believe will be powerful, significant or striking but which end up being somewhat … bathetic.
Two weeks ago, you may recall, the nature of Mr Drake's 'moistness' revolved around allegations spread by others in the R&B/hip-hop community that he had 'fake abs'. An Instagram photo of Mr Drake showed him proudly sporting a considerable six-pack that, unfortunately, seemed to be 'physically contradicted' by the fact that his arms did not match his tum-tum in terms of buffness. He was very 'torso of God, arms of Bod'. This was because, the internet decided, he had simply got plastic surgery done on his tum-tum. He has fake abs. What the Kardashians are for bums, Mr Drake is for men's bellies.
Well, the kerfuffle over the fake abs had barely calmed down when yet another bathetic hoo-ha sprang up, focusing yet again on Mr Drake's small, normal arms. Until recently he was friends with LeBron James, to the extent of having a tattoo of the legendary basketball player's face on his comparatively spindly upper limbs.
However, the world of America's most alpha men is, it seems, just as febrile, factional and petty as the world of teenage girls. A huge feud has erupted between Mr Drake and his fellow rapper Kendrick Lamar, and despite the whole 'tattoo on the arm thing', James eventually sided with Lamar.
The result? Well, this week Mr Drake appeared in public with the tattoo of James magically vanished. Instead, his arm is covered in a tattoo honouring the Oklahoma City Thunder player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — at a considerable cost of inkage, one imagines.
What does it look like? Well, covering up a tattoo of one black man with an image suggesting another black man on a black man's arm, with black ink, just ends up looking a bit … rain cloud-like. It's hard to make anything out. Mr Drake should have really gone for a replacement tattoo in a whole other colourway: Kermit in green, for instance, or a blue Smurf, would have really popped. If men are to have these kind of Mean Girls-style fallings-out, they need to plan better for how they will negotiate the consequences.
There has been a kerfuffle in the Bobiverse, as the famed musical curmudgeon Bob Dylan has continued his policy of banning mobile phones from his forthcoming gigs. For the audience to 'be in the moment', they will have their phones taken from them when they enter the venue and they will only be handed back at the end. As someone who also hates people using their mobile phones at gigs, I am 100 per cent supportive of Dylan's move. Indeed, I would suggest that he go one step further and arrange to play all of his legendary Basement Tapes album in an actual basement — as there's no reception down there.
Conor McGregor, the Irish mixed martial arts champion, has been beset by scandal recently after being photographed kissing a woman who is not his long-term partner, the mother of his four children. However, in response to this scandal McGregor did an odd thing: he liked a post condemning him for such a move. 'Bro his wife is so much better than these bitches,' the post read. 'What the f*** is Conor doing bruh fr, got a smoking hot wife who has stuck with him through all the allegations and bullshit and multiple children and he's out here with a 4/10 torta.'
Despite the fact I do not understand much of this message, I do understand one thing. In liking a brutal online condemnation of his own actions, McGregor has invented a new thing: a 21st-century way for men to admit they have done something wrong. Yes, it's low-effort, cowardly, impersonal and emotionally unsatisfying — but it is new. And these days that's what counts.
It's rapidly becoming clear that we are witnessing one of humanity's all-time engineering feats. Until this year the deepest hole ever dug on Earth was Russia's piquantly named Kola Superdeep Borehole, which in 1989 reached a depth of 12,262m, or 7.6 miles for those who like their hole depths in old money.
As one would expect, the Kola Superdeep Borehole required a lot of infrastructure — it was backed by the Soviet government, took 30 years to complete and is estimated to have cost more than £75 million. Having read everything about it I have to say that is also seems to be really quite pointless. We are not, by and large, living in a post-Kola Superdeep Borehole world. At 3.7 miles down scientists found some plankton fossils, but this seems to be the extent of the Kola Superdeep Borehole's utility. The hole is now abandoned. Thirty years of effortful digging yielded not very much at all.
Let us, then, marvel at what has in a matter of months overtaken the Kola Superdeep Borehole to become the new 'deepest hole ever dug on Earth': the reputational career shaft being endlessly deepened by the former MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace.
Clearly a man who has never heard the phrase 'when you're in a hole, stop digging', Wallace has spent the past year issuing a series of escalatingly catastrophic statements following each and every setback that has assailed him. If the Kola Superdeep Borehole was 7.6 miles deep, Wallace right now is at 10 miles and counting. I genuinely cannot remember the last time someone sabotaged their own career and reputation so badly. Any future celebrity so spectacularly torpedoing their own existence will in future be greeted with the phrase, 'Dude, you've Gregged it.'
To recap: in October 2024 Wallace still dwelt on the pleasant surface of the Earth's crust (as did MasterChef's John Torode, fired this week after a legal review into his own behaviour on the show). Wallace was the presenter of MasterChef, Celebrity MasterChef, MasterChef: The Professionals and Inside the Factory, an astonishingly fortunate haul of BBC tent poles given that 90 per cent of Wallace's presenting gifts lay in saying, 'That crumble isn't juicy enough,' even when in a factory producing sieves. In November, though, the first allegations came to light and news came that Wallace was going to 'step away' from MasterChef while accusations of historical misconduct were investigated.
While others would at this juncture apologise profusely, promise that 'lessons will be learnt', do a bunch of charity work then make a comeback two years later, Wallace picked up his spade and got to work as if he had waited his entire life for this moment. Boldly and unrepentantly he took to Instagram and broke first sod on his reputational mineshaft. 'These allegations come from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age,' he said, looking furious and deciding to blame everything that had gone wrong on the cashmere-wearing menopauserati.
An inevitable backlash to this mad misogyny ensued and by the time Kirsty Wark, Kirstie Allsopp, Melanie Sykes, Vanessa Feltz and, incredibly, Rod Stewart ('You're a tubby, bald-headed, ill-mannered bully') had backed the allegations, Wallace was already 10ft down.
• Rod Stewart: Gregg Wallace is a bully who humiliated my wife
Fast-forward to this month, and the BBC investigation finally found that Wallace had a 19-year-long track record of inappropriate behaviour, sexual language, racially insensitive remarks and unwanted physical contact. While waiting for the report to be published, Wallace and his spade had already put another couple of miles between him and the sky, pre-emptively stating that his recently diagnosed autism was a factor in his behaviour and suggesting that the BBC had 'failed to investigate my disability' and 'failed to protect me from what I now realise was a dangerous environment'.
Neurodiversity charities and activists were immediately up in arms. Not even the most radical campaigner wanted to back Wallace's suggestion that, for instance, his track record of calling contestants 'sexy' more than 139 times on social media was anything to do with neurodiversity. And they treated as radioactive the claim that Wallace's repeated nudity or semi-nudity on set was because Wallace's autism gave him 'an inability to wear underwear'.
Seema Flower, founder of the Blind Ambition disability training consultancy, was horrified: 'This is very, very poor,' she said. 'Because the general public will now think, 'That person's got autism — they're going to be likely to abuse me.' People will now be less likely to employ people with autism. It's also making a mockery of the whole diagnosis of autism.'
Having in rapid succession lost the backing of the BBC, middle-aged women and neurodiverse people, on Monday Wallace strapped a spade to both hands, both feet and his own mad head, and tried to complete the set by alienating 64 per cent of the country: the working classes.
'For a working-class man with a direct manner, modern broadcasting has become a dangerous place,' Wallace said, now firmly heading towards the Earth's core. 'I was the headline this time. But I won't be the last.'
Given that Wallace is by my estimates up to his knees in the Earth's molten core, I don't want to kick a guy when he's down — 3,959 miles down. But the initial reaction from 'the working classes' has not been supportive of Wallace's suggestion that a key part of working-class culture is not wearing pants and being a known bother for more than a decade. It's not the way of Melvyn Bragg. Sue Townsend never pulled this shit.
Still, there is one mildly positive aspect to the Gregg Wallace Superproblematic Borehole. While the Russian hole yielded nothing but plankton, Wallace's bottomless shaft is yielding data that psychologists, sociologists, feminists and, let's face it, lawyers will be analysing for years to come. The power of the Russian state has nothing on this grocer turned miner. In a way it makes you proud to be British.