On the face of it, the interview is really very funny. But also, it’s not
It’s a tricky business, writing one of those “how I spend my Saturday” pieces for a newspaper supplement. If you get it right, you can cast yourself as something of a legend but if you get it wrong, you run the risk of painting yourself as an absolute monster. Which is exactly what
You might be wondering what activities Gregg could have admitted to which would prompt such horror. Does he spring out of bed to skin Dalmatian puppies and then take a shift at his Cigarettes For Kidz shop? Perhaps he rides around on a public bus playing music out of a 2010 iPhone?, meets his PA for breakfast and then comes home at midday, at which point his wife has made him lunch.
If, at this point, you’re starting to think that it can’t get any worse, he then volunteers information which you couldn’t have got out of me with a blowtorch and a crowbar. He explains that he had two requests before agreeing to have a child. That he and his wife would have help and that they’d get at least a week’s holiday without their child, per year.Obviously the interview is doing the rounds on social media, with people comparing him to Alan Partridge and laughing at the ghastliness of it.
After Gregg spends 90 minutes with his son he says he then spends two hours playing some sort of war-based history game on the computer, and then cooks dinner. He again volunteers a piece of information that he really didn’t have to give us – that he cooks dinner for the family once a week. Once.
The response to this piece has probably been a bit uncomfortable for Team Wallace. No one wants to end up being the main character of the internet for the week. But I can’t help hoping that this very public shaming might help Gregg to gain a bit of perspective, and perhaps next Saturday he might do the decent thing and switch the computer off an hour earlier.