The investigation into alleged sexual harassment and misconduct by BBC Master Chef judge and celebrity greengrocer Gregg Wallace is being hampered by a flood of false stories spread on social media, fears one former corporation official. “I’m afraid that, as with many of these cases, we’ve got to the stage where the media have run out of genuine allegations to splash across their front pages, so instead start turning to all those completely unattributed – not to mention utterly bizarre – allegations which inevitably spring up on social media,” worries Dick Farker, former BBC Head of Pious Programming. “They’re, at best, speculation, which those spreading them try to give some minimal credence to by attributing them to ‘a mate’s second cousin’s hairdresser’ and the like. Their utter ridiculousness simply serves to dilute the seriousness of the original allegations.” Nevertheless, some of the most frivolous sounding such rumours have turned out to have some credence. “Only the other day, I saw one claiming that, when Wallace had been recording and episode of Inside the Factory at the Nestle factory he was asked to leave and never come back, supposedly for being rude to someone on the Aero production line,” admits Farker. “Utterly ridiculous and unattributed, I thought. But a memo from Nestle to the BBC has subsequently turned up, apparently verifying this!” Farker, nonetheless, still has reservations about this particular story, pointing out that there are two contradictory versions, one claiming that Wallace was thrown out of the factory after farting in the Aero mix, claiming that he was demonstrating a novel way of getting the bubbles into the chocolate, the other that he was caught stirring the KitKat chocolate mix with his penis. “He couldn’t have been doing both at the same time, now could he?” he points out. “So, clearly one is completely made up!”

Farker points to a whole slew of recent allegations regarding Wallace’s pre TV days as a greengrocer, from supposed customers he allegedly harassed in his Peckham corner shop. Most prominent amongst these was the claim from a Doreen Prestik that he was fond of painting his cock and balls green, sticking them in his fruit and veg display and pretending that they were a marrow and two cantaloupes. “When some unfortunate housewife went to prod them, to check their freshness, he’d scare the life out of them by twitching his member,” she told the Daily Norks. “He’d laugh uproariously and treat it as some kind of huge practical joke, but it wasn’t so funny for us customers: I remember that he gave poor Mary Slatters palpitations, while Susie Strokes ran screaming out of the shop. Her hair turned white overnight. She was only twenty three.” A variation on this prank was allegedly for Wallace to paint his bare buttocks green and stick them through a hole he’d cut in the melons table, while he hid underneath. “He’d break wind violently if anyone gave his ‘melons’ a squeeze,” recalled Prestik in the newspaper article. “again, he thought it was hilarious, but old Mrs Hipstaff quite literally shit herself the first time he did it.” In a more sinister turn, Prestik claimed that Wallace was once caught having sex with a life size sex doll made of fruit and veg in the shop’s back room. “I swear he’d left the door between the back room and the shop open deliberately,” she alleges. “WE walked in and there he was, in full view, his trousers around his ankles, his hands all over the doll’s melon breasts, taking her up the asparagus.”

As Farker points out, while these claims might seem, superficially, credible, they simply don’t stand up to scrutiny. “For one thing, while Wallace might have started as a greengrocer, he never ran a corner shop in Peckham or anywhere else,” he says. “He ran a multi-million pound corporation supplying fruit and vegetables to retailers. So this woman certainly couldn’t have been a customer.” Indeed, the Daily Norks has since admitted that it has been unable to verify Pestik’s claims, let alone trace her since it paid her for the story. “It’s the same with some of these claims relating to his TV career,” Muses Farker. “Just look at some of the allegations being made by the ” A recent article in the Daily Excess claimed that Wallace had promised to get some women onto Master Chef in exchange for participating in bizarre sex games. “He got me to strip naked and baste myself all over, then told me to climb into the oven. He said that he’d come and ‘prod’ me when I was done. I tried backing into the oven, but only my backside would fit – I ended up with a well browned arse,” a Joan Warpington is quoted as claiming. “Subsequently, I never heard from the BBC about being on the show, despite the bastard’s promises.” In similar vein, another woman alleged that Wallace got her to strip naked and climb onto a silver plater, after which he stuck an apple in her mouth and poured gravy over her before taking her roughly from behind with a parsnip, telling her that he’d get her on Master Chef if she went along with it.

As before, Farker points out, these claims are all demonstrably false. “Not only has Wallace never had any say on selection of the contestants, but all of these women have proven elusive when the authorities have sought further details from them,” he notes. “It’s as if they never actually existed, as if they were just made up by the tabloids.” But who or what lies behind these false allegations which are hampering the investigation into Wallace by obfuscating the facts surrounding the more serious allegations? “There’s the school of thought that believes that they are part of a deliberate attempt to discredit the original allegations, organised, perhaps, by some right-wing men’s rights activist group,” muses Farker. “Then there are those who suspect that the media itself is behind the latest stories, disappointed that the more credible allegations are simply not sensational enough, instead feeling too sad and sordid to sell newspapers and drive online clicks.”

Ultimately, Farker contends, the Gregg Wallace controversy, like all sex scandals, has become a bandwagon that all manner of individuals will jump on in order to try and exploit in advance of their own agendas, with the actual victims in danger of becoming of secondary importance. “For many right-wing pundits they are just another battlefield in their tiresome ‘culture wars’, where women who complain about being inappropriately touched or flashed at by a male TV personality are somehow overreacting as a result of having been infected by ‘wokeness’,” he opines. “Apparently, there’s some kind of sliding scale for abuse, with lower level sexual harassment being seen as somehow harmless, just a bit of ‘larking about’. The perpetrator might be being a ‘bit of a cock’, or even an ‘obnoxious dick’, but still falls short of being a full on sex pest. But does where the cut off point lie? At what point do the likes of Wallace cross the threshold from being ‘annoying twat’ to sex offender?”