Melanie Sykes: 'I quit television because of Gregg Wallace'

The former model and presenter was on Celebrity Masterchef in 2021 and said she was unsettled by the encounter with the boorish former greengrocer.

Sykes said Wallace greeted her on set by asking whether models eat, which she said was “unprofessional” and driven by “ignorance and disrespect with an extra helping of arrogance”. She described him “barking orders” in a way that made her want to get out.

She said she made an informal, but not a formal, complaint, about him. She wrote about the experience in her autobiography Illuminated: Autism & All The Things I’ve Left Unsaid, which came out last year.

On YouTube she said: “Every time Gregg came over to the desk I didn’t really like him being around really, because it is all about vibrations and energy.”

In the video, in which she also lambasts the tabloid newspapers which she says she hates and does not speak to, mocking the “poorly written emails” that she said she has been sent, Sykes said she did not care about winning the show because she “wanted to get out”.

Sykes said she found some “unprofessional” conduct on set “jaw-dropping”.

The former presenter is best known for her Boddingtons advert in the 1990s and as the co-host of Today with Des and Mel in the early 2000s.

In the book Sykes wrote: ‘‘The MasterChef experience continued to be an eye-opener, and some unprofessional behaviour on set was jaw-dropping.”

While she did not give further details in the book, she said in her recent YouTube video that “every time Gregg came over to the desk, I didn’t really like him being around really because it’s all about vibrations and energy”.

At the end of filming the show, Sykes said she had a short conversation with Wallace, which was instrumental in her leaving television.

She wrote that the former greengrocer told her that appearing on the show would do a lot for her, adding: “I didn’t know what to say, so I smiled and said yes, but I was really thinking, ‘Yes, you have finally helped me decide to end my television career once and for all’. I was done.”