I don’t know Gregg Wallace, the Masterchef presenter currently in trouble because of his alleged inappropriate comments and behaviour. But I worked in TV myself for many years and as a coach I have heard countless women complain about this same objectionable behaviour in their male colleagues.
There have been a few attempts by unnamed ‘friends’ to explain Gregg Wallace’s behaviour, attributing it to undiagnosed autism, but mostly the comments have been condemnatory, especially since he tried to justify himself by blaming the apparent mere handful of ‘middle class women of a certain age’ (his own age) for complaining about him. In his view, it’s all snobbery.
Looking past the allegations to what might cause this behaviour gives a different lens.
When they were boys, these men were in effect left to fend for themselves. Parental abandonment can take all sorts of forms. Maybe the parent died or disappeared because of divorce or mental health problems, leaving a single parent struggling to manage money and child care. Maybe paid staff were hired to take care of him or he was sent to boarding school. Maybe both parents were physically present but psychologically absent in a chaotic household that was also bedevilled by poverty. As he enters adolescence, the boy finds acceptance and emotional engagement with others just like himself. Whether in a boarding school or on the streets of London, he’s part of a ‘gang’ of other boys with its own rules.
By the time they reach their twelfth birthday, these boys have had no adult role models. They learn to make a virtue of their physical strength and crude jokes. In an elite environment they get rewarded for being verbally clever, even though it’s always at someone else’s expense. They don’t know how to negotiate: they’ve never seen it done properly. They don’t know how to deal with women because at that critical point in their development, emotionally mature adult women have been absent from their lives. They needed boundaries from a strong, loving mother or father figure who just wasn’t there. Physically they mature, but emotionally they have got stuck at the pre-adolescent stage.
Energy and intelligence may get rewards and they may appear to do well at least at first. But sooner or later, their lack of subtlety betrays them. They have no self-awareness. They can’t regulate their emotions. They are exceptionally thin skinned while appearing cocky. Their ‘jokes’ are off-colour but they don’t notice. They cannot manage relationships and their marriages fall apart. As they get older, they choose the same woman. She’s young and blonde but she can’t put up with him for long either and she hasn’t got the patience to teach him how to behave. Why should she? It’s not her role to be responsible for the conduct of men.
Social class plays a part in this. Gregg Wallace is part of a generation betrayed by the education system. If you failed the Eleven Plus exam you got dumped in a secondary modern school where nothing was expected of you. No one taught you critical thinking nor how to express yourself, spell or punctuate. As a young man, the best you could hope for was a labouring job. When you met people who had been luckier, you will for certain have been patronised, mocked for your accent and ‘ungrammatical’ way of speaking. If you find a career in the media as a performer, you might defend yourself by boasting about your ’working class’ origins, all the time being aware at some level that you are being used. You are the cheeky chappie who is meant to reassure audiences that it is not just about ‘the liberal elite’.
But it’s not really about class. For a startling example, read Anne Glenconner’s book ostensibly about Princess Margaret but actually about her marriage to Colin Tennant, a man whose care was left to nannies and nursemaids and who was never able to manage the outbursts of rage that overcame him when he couldn’t have his own way, behaviour that most of us grow out of as toddlers. Then there’s Boris Johnson and Jeremy Clarkson among many others.
None of this excuses sexist jokes and rudeness. These men will have been told countless times not to do it, but they don’t take it in, they are too invested in the ‘character’ they have created to defend themselves. They are terrified by the idea of changing. They attribute their ‘success’ to the very thing that is now their downfall, not seeing that success came despite not because of their egregious behaviour. Accused of being the perpetrator they adopt the victim posture, but this time no one is listening.
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Photo: Richard Gillin from St Albans, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
