Chef awarded £80k after manager sexually harassed him with Victoria Wood song
A HEAD chef has won almost £80,000 in compensation after his boss sexually harassed him by singing a Victoria Wood song to him in a suggestive way.
Andrew Wilson serenaded Sam Nunns with the comic’s Ballad of Barry and Freda and made a series of “disconcerting gestures” as he emphasised the lyric “let’s do it” in January 2022.
Mr Nunns complained that Mr Wilson, the manager at the Windermere Manor Hotel, in Cumbria, “attempted eye contact” while gesticulating and singing the song, which tells of a woman propositioning her introverted husband for sex. Wood’s song features lyrics such as: “Let’s do it, let’s do it, do it while the mood is right/ I’m feeling appealing, I’ve really got an appetite/ I’m on fire, with desire, I could handle half the tenors in a Male Voice Choir/ Let’s do it, let’s do it tonight.”
The chef told an employment tribunal Mr Wilson had repeatedly touched his thigh and bottom and lingered while hugging him as he worked at the £170-a-night hotel. He said that on other occasions Mr Wilson referred to a cucumber and asked him, “Do you need some time alone dear” and “I’ll put olive oil on the orders list again”.
Around the same time, he faked an orgasm when eating the chef ’s food and then hugged, “mildly dramatised dry-humping” him.
Following a “string of assaults” at the 1850s hotel, Mr Nunns resigned and decided to sue. Although the tribunal ruled that several of these incidents did not constitute harassment, an employment judge said the song had “violated his dignity” and was humiliating. It amounted to unwanted sexual conduct, along with repeated touching, massaging his shoulders and saying he loved him. Mr Nunns has been awarded compensation of £79,119.
Mr Wilson admitted he sang the song but said this was only because the comedian had come up in conversation and Mr Nunns hadn’t heard it.
Other incidents were said to have happened at the hotel – owned by Starboard Hotels – but were not found to be harassment. After filing a grievance, Mr Nunns felt he had been “continuously treated unacceptably” and felt forced to resign in July 2022.
Phil Allen, the employment judge, said that the tribunal accepted that Mr Wilson sang the sexually-charged song with “particular emphasis being placed upon the words repeated regularly throughout the song of ‘let’s do it’ and those words being accompanied by eye contact and disconcerting gestures towards the [him]”.