‘I wasn’t willing to swap my sexy young wife for an exhausted mum...’
chance. If I want to exercise or have time with my baby son, it goes in my diary. I like to have a 20-minute walk every day. Oh, and a 20-minute nap in the afternoon. If I don’t list them, they won’t happen!’. There are more lists for his new lifestyle. He counts calories, is meticulous about grocery shopping (‘it’s in the diary’) and gym sessions are sacrosanct. He often gets up at 5am, then works out daily at 6am.
Sometimes it seems Wallace has been shrinking for much of his TV career. At his heaviest he weighed more than 16½ stone, but he lost a few stone circa 2012 and at one time was an ambassador for WeightWatchers.
Meeting Anna, though, coincided with a new push to get in shape — focusing as much on fitness as diet. Now he’s reached his target of 12½ stone and has taken to showing off his six-pack on Instagram, treating us all to visions of him lunging in his garden. Some say they preferred him lunging into a pudding, but he’s undeniably sleeker. His secret weapon? A younger wife helps. ‘Anna says she doesn’t care what size I am, but she’s always going to be a lot younger than me. I want to be fit and healthy for her for two reasons. I want her to still fancy me and I don’t want to die prematurely and leave her on her own.’
With the evangelical zeal of the newly fit, he looks back on the old Gregg with horror.
‘Watching myself on TV was the trigger,’ he says. ‘I was just getting fatter and fatter. I was eating the wrong things, drinking too much. I was a terrible advert for myself.’
He’s unusually frank about the impact on his career.
‘We don’t like to say it, but TV is a hugely image-conscious industry. I know it might sometimes look like I don’t do anything, but I work very hard, and part of that is looking as well as you can. It’s an advert about who you are, what sort of person you are.
‘Do you have discipline? Do you care about yourself? And I have got more telly work now that I’m slimmer. Maybe how you are physically is a sign of how you are mentally.’
There’s no denying Gregg is a different man to the one I interviewed in 2013, when he had recently split from wife No 3 (Heidi Brown, a biology teacher 17 years his junior, whom he met on Twitter when she asked him a question about celery) after only 15 months of marriage.
He told me at the time that marriage No 1 — to Christine, in 1991 — didn’t count because it lasted just six weeks. Then came a fiveyear union with pastry chef Denise. They divorced in 2004 after he had an affair with a colleague, and he gained custody of their children, then aged eight and ten.
After Heidi left him, he was a man on the edge, bombarded with advice from his managers to ‘be careful’ with women (‘ Stupid advice,’ he recalls now. ‘What does it mean? Am I supposed to hand out a questionnaire?’).
He had also just started seeing Anna, again after meeting on Twitter (she asked him whether rhubarb goes with duck). A few days after our interview, he was involved in an unseemly brawl at a function, embarrassing his BBC bosses. His career seemed in jeopardy. All things considered, I gave their relationship zero chance.
Yet here they are, seven years on. Has he matured, changed somehow?
‘It’s Anna, just Anna,’ he says. ‘She just likes me. It’s effortless with her.’
Who is in charge in their relationship, I wonder? ‘She’s in charge.’ Anna disagrees. ‘Is anyone in charge?’, she says, frowning at him. Actually I think she might well be in charge, but in a quiet and clever way.
She stopped him drinking, he says, not by telling him to stop, but by getting him to ‘ focus on the feeling after each drink’. ‘Italians do that. We don’t,’ he says. ‘By the second, we have that feeling of euphoria and keep going because we want it to continue, but by the ninth, we are crying. Anna made me think about that.’
What of the age thing? She shakes her head and says ‘age is just a number’. Gregg admits it embarrassed him, at first. He refused to hold her hand in public, ‘because I could imagine people thinking she was the mistress,
or she was a gold-digger’. He met Anna’s parents a few months in, taking them to dinner at Le Caprice. Rina barely spoke — ‘I realised later she was starstruck because I was Gregg Wallace off the TV’ — but later said the fact Gregg’s teenage children lived with him convinced her he was a ‘good person and a family man’.
Gregg and Massimo had a man talk. ‘We went out for a cigarette and I’d arranged for the manager to follow us out with two glasses of whisky. I asked him if the age thing bothered him and he said “my daughter looks very happy to me”. That was enough for him.’
As it turned out, Anna is exactly the sort of woman Gregg hadn’t realised he wanted: a homebody. This unsettled him at first. He assumed Anna would want her own turn in the limelight.
‘Anna does all the recipes for the new website. She’s the best home cook I know. I wanted her to be more up front. I said: “I can help you with a media career.” She said: “But you don’t understand. I don’t want that.” All she wanted was a husband and a family.’
He, meanwhile, adores being the breadwinner. ‘I love it. It’s really old-fashioned and I feel I should apologise sometimes, but I do like it. I take it very seriously.’
So much so that he had a ‘blind panic’ at the start of lockdown, when filming halted.
‘I had real anxiety, rashes coming out on my legs. All I do is work and all of a sudden that had been taken away. Then I realised I had enough money to see us through.’
He has clearly done the maths. ‘I’m still ambitious, though I feel I’m running out of work years.’
His daughter Libby, 24, lives with them too and adores Rina (‘she calls her The Golden One’). He would like son Tom, 26, who lives in Bristol with his girlfriend, to join them. (‘I asked what it would cost me for him to move in. He said: “Could you buy me a pub?”’). W
HEN they bought the house, he didn’t expect Anna to contribute. He was amazed when she did. ‘When we met she had £35k in savings,’ he says, turning to check she’s OK with him mentioning the figures. She nods.
‘I said, “Blimey, Anna, where did you get that sort of money? A lot of women your age have £35k in credit card debt.” She’d saved it up. When we bought this place, she transferred every penny to my account and told me to put it into the house.’ Anna says, calmly: ‘I wanted it to be ours.’
Now, he finds it hilarious (and reassuring) that she continues to shop in Primark and M&S. ‘I say “if you see something you fancy in Armani...”’ Anna shudders. ‘ I’m not like that.’
even once the family arrangement was agreed, they were warned they might struggle to have children. Anna had severe endometriosis, and they thought they would need IVF. ‘But then a miracle happened,’ says Gregg.
After Sid’s birth, she had a hysterectomy, ruling out more children. ‘ But we only planned to have one anyway,’ says Anna, with a quiet note of decision.
They’re both besotted with Sid. Gregg reckons he is going to be a rugby player, a dream which luckily, even as an older father, he is now in shape to handle.
‘I coached my older son in rugby. I wanted to be fit enough to do that for Sid too, and now I am.’
GreGG and Anna’s website, showme.fit launches today
I want to be fit for her so she still fancies me!