Who cares about Gregg Wallace?

In 1986 the late Martin Amis published a book of essays called The Moronic Inferno – a title he had borrowed from the writers Saul Bellow and Wyndham Lewis. The essays focused on Amis’s dim view of culture in the USA. These aspects of American life have long since crossed the pond, and we are all now living in a Moronic Inferno – a veritable cauldron of cretinism and ignorance.

At the time of writing this piece, the lead story on national news bulletins for five whole days has been not Gaza, Syria or the Donbas, still less the plight of farmers or the elderly, but the travails of a BBC television ‘celebrity’ named Gregg Wallace. As readers of Spectator Life are doubtless too discerning to be familiar with Mr Wallace’s programmes, I should perhaps explain that he hosts a show called Master Chef, in which contestants compete to prepare and serve up toothsome recipes for Wallace’s delectation and judgment.