Not a master of disguise
ARE you familiar with the children’s cartoon game Where’s Wally? It’s the one where in each picture you must attempt to locate a cute bespectacled character in a striped woollen bobble hat, lurking somewhere or other within a sea of not entirely dissimilar faces.
To be honest, it’s a pain in the neck. I don’t have the patience.
Besides which, if and when you do manage to spot this guy, what happens next? Do you win a prize? You do not.You merely congratulate yourself on your powers of observation and then turn the page and start the whole exhausting process over again with the next sea of faces. Honestly, what a faff.
Me, I much prefer my own version, entitled Where’s Wallace?
Not only is it considerably easier to play – you merely have to switch on your television and find a programme with GreggWallace in it, which will normally take you a matter of seconds – but it’s also a lot more rewarding. Why? Well, obviously because you then get to watch a programme with Gregg Wallace in it.And who doesn’t love doing that? Exactly.
Tonight he’s in two (and quite possibly more, I dare say, if you care to root around among the repeats-driven digital channels).
One of them, of course, is MASTERCHEF (8.30pm, BBC1), where we’ve somehow reached the last of the quarter-finals.
That means that by the time tonight’s closing titles roll, we’ll have just 10 contenders left from the original goodness-knows-howmany-it-was (a couple of thousand? That sounds about right) that we started out with.
To decide which two survive and which two must unfortunately leave, the chefs must wow not just Gregg and his co-host John Torode but also guest judges Steven Wallis, Kenny Tutt and Thomasina Miers.
All three of those (in case you’ve just gone: “Sorry, am I meant to know who these people are? Is Kenny Tutt a guy who plays the trumpet? He certainly sounds like he ought to be…”) are former MasterChef champions.
Elsewhere, Gregg’s other appearance tonight is in GREGG WALLACE’S ISLAND GETAWAY (7pm, Channel 5), where he travels to Madeira and, well, essentially has himself a very nice time.
Highlights include a boat trip where he gets to see some whales.
Gregg gets so excited – and rightly so, of course: he’s never seen a whale before – that he whips out his phone and immediately starts filming, presumably having forgotten there’s a cameraman sitting beside him.
Later he samples some Madeira wine that’s more than 100 years old.
Apparently, it costs 150 euros per glass. I dread to think how much they sting you for the new stuff.