Gregg Wallace: a man out of time?

On screen, Gregg Wallace's down-to-earth charm was one of "MasterChef"'s "key ingredients", said The Daily Telegraph. The former greengrocer from south London was known for lively banter that was often laced with innuendo. It didn't cause offence, but the BBC has now been thrown into crisis by allegations that, off camera, the 60-year-old's "cheeky chappy routine" crossed the line into behaviour that was deeply inappropriate at work – and as a result, Wallace has "stepped aside".

More than a dozen women have alleged that he told "disgusting", offensive and sexualised jokes, talked openly about his sex life and asked staff about theirs. Allegedly, he once arrived in the studio naked except for a sock over his penis. He is also accused of "jokily" pulling a female assistant's head towards his crotch after she'd knelt down to remove a stain from his trousers, and of putting his hands over another's bottom when she was bending over, and saying "Corr!". Didn't Wallace get the memo, wondered Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The i Paper. Sexist "banter" of this sort was the norm at work in the 1970s when he started in the veg business, but it wasn't by the time he moved into TV in 2002.

And though he insists he's done nothing wrong, he hardly helped his case by dismissing his accusers as "middle-class women of a certain age". He has since apologised for this, but there was a kernel of truth in it, said Eleanor Mills in The Independent. In a precarious industry, older women, with well-established careers, may end up speaking out for the sake of younger ones. Kirsty Wark, who once appeared on "Celebrity MasterChef", got the ball rolling. Kirstie Allsopp later tweeted that the first time she met Wallace, in a TV green room, he'd told her about a sex act. "Did he get off on how embarrassed I was?" she asked. But women had not been silent before. Over the years, several had reported his conduct to the BBC. Yet he just got a "talking to", and it seems nothing changed.

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There's the nub of it, said Aggie MacKenzie in the Daily Express. Wallace deserved to be called out for his offensive behaviour. But in the media pile-on and public shaming, we seem to be forgetting that he has not been accused, let alone convicted, of anything criminal – yet his life is being destroyed even so. And, in this frenzy, we risk missing the broader issue, which is that junior staff didn't feel able to challenge the star presenter, and executives allowed a toxic working environment to fester. Tearing down one man won't bring meaningful change. For that, we must focus on the systemic failures.