JANET STREET-PORTER: Why is the Beeb so in love with Gregg Wallace? He's NEVER off our screens - are they too scared to silence a shouty bloke who has become their token working-class hero?

Gregg Wallace is REALLY UPSET because a lot of people seem to find the way he spends his weekends rather odd. After rising at 5am, the former greengrocer and barrow boy reads a book about a Russian nobleman for an hour, heads to the gym (which opens early just for him), works out and then dashes off to the local Harvester to shovel down a huge fry-up with his PA at 10.30am. Ninety minutes later, the telly presenter and recent lifestyle guru is back at home eating a healthy home-made lunch with his lovely wife and her Italian parents. That’s a lot to digest.

I worked with Gregg when competing on two series of Celebrity Masterchef, and got to know him pretty well, from his noisy rants onscreen to his recent obsession with fitness. You may find it surprising that after years in the brutal world of telly, I’m not frightened of ANYONE, but any encounter with Gregg can be a difficult experience. I’ll be treading on eggshells and offence can easily be taken.

He’s thin-skinned, a combination of bravado and strident self-promotion allied with low self-esteem and sensitivity. A man who goes on the attack with his ghastly jokes and foghorn voice (I know, pot and kettle) before you can get a word in edgeways. When he sees me, he always gets a putdown in first. I can deal with that, but then starts blabbering on without drawing breath about whatever he’s trying to flog. He clearly thinks my job is to give Gregg space and shut up! And don’t ever criticise – he’ll suddenly morph into sarky mean Gregg at the drop of a hat. God forbid an interviewer is granted equal time in any encounter.

Gregg Wallace is REALLY UPSET because a lot of people seem to find the way he spends his weekends rather odd

This time around, the talking tannoy is upset because some nasty souls on social media criticised him for implying he only had his adorable son to please his wife Anna, 21 years his junior. In the excruciating description of his weekend, he appears to set aside just a couple of hours to play with his adorable son Sid who has been diagnosed with non-verbal autism.

If you read the entire piece, it’s clear he loves his son, and a touching bit of honesty about being the trials of being an older dad has been taken out of context.

Gregg is steaming (I suspect) because people are poking fun at his preposterous attempts at self-improvement – the step-counting, the manifesting, the interest in history, the War Games. He obviously agreed to the article to promote his business interests, managing to plug his healthy living website (annual subscription £89.99), the local branch of Harvester, his upcoming series of BBC1’s Masterchef, his new podcast A Piece of Cake, and his local fishmonger. Fair enough.

Anyone stupid enough to set out their daily routine is bound to look like a pretentious twat to the rest of us loafers. Remember Hollywood star and former rapper Mark Wahlberg revealing he woke up at 2.30am to pray, finally going to bed at 7.30pm and spending most of the time when he wasn’t praying working out in the gym or freezing in a cryochamber to fight the ageing process. It was hilarious. Mind you, he’s worth something like $450million now, so the praying worked.

I do not get up at 5am and never go to sleep till midnight. I certainly don’t head to a Harvester for anything I can make myself but, according to Gregg, his time is so precious he prepares just one meal a week for the family.

My day is as random as yours. I shout at rubbish on the telly and waste ages trying to beat a computer at scrabble.

I moan at my cabbage plants for not growing, so I suppose Gregg and I have some little habits in common. Not enough to get me a job hosting a major series on BBC1 though!

This unlikely Casanova has even managed to get a gig promoting Valentine’s Day – posing naked apart from thousands of strategically placed red roses

Here’s the astonishing truth: BBC bosses bloody love Gregg Wallace. He’s never off the screen. No woman of his age could ever compete with the cheery cockney, certainly not one wearing glasses with a bald head shouting at the top of their voice.

It doesn’t seem to matter that many female viewers find Gregg a bit weird – and his blokey humour can occasionally land him in trouble. He left the highly successful BBC2 series Inside the Factory in 2023 (after presenting it for five years) following reports that he made some female staff ‘feel uncomfortable’ when filming at the Nestle factory in York.

Gregg was distraught, saying ‘I use humour to relax people…I never set out to offend’. But his joking can be a bit brutal, designed to put off the Masterchef contestants and anyone he thinks is a threat- this is definitely a Marmite character. No female presenter would ever be tolerated for being so rude, but look at Alan Sugar… double standards!

Do BBC bosses cut Gregg some slack because he’s from the working class and they’re terrified that critics see them as too middle class: Hampstead talking to Chiswick?

Could this obsession with attracting lower income blokes to watch the BBC be the reason Paddy McGuinness appeared on Question Time this week? Although there were some complaints, Paddy did not come across negatively and attracted plenty of compliments for his opinions on Labour’s chances of winning the next election.

If Greg has had a weakness in the past, it’s women. Like me, he’s has been married four times. Wife number one left after just six weeks. Wife two – Denise, a former pastry chef – is the mother of his eldest children, Tom and Libby. How Gregg met his subsequent partners is somewhat unusual. Wife number three, Heidi Brown, a teacher, caught his attention when she asked him a question on Twitter about celery (really) and although they married a year later, it lasted just 15 months. Current wife Anna came to Greg’s attention when she tweeted asking if rhubarb really went with duck. Greg admits he was impressed by her photo and one thing led to another. They became engaged and married in 2016, with his co-host from Masterchef, John Torode, acting as best man.

Having failed in business three times, Greg is clearly determined this time around his new ventures promoting healthy living and weight loss should succeed. But he doesn’t have to tell us he’s an amateur historian, a keen reader, an avid step counter and that he had shed half his body weight.

This unlikely Casanova has even managed to get a gig promoting Valentine’s Day – posing naked apart from thousands of strategically placed red roses. Funded by Smarty Mobile, he’ll be handing out free bouquets tomorrow on London’s South Bank.

Don’t all rush.