“Women of a certain age…They learn to rely and judge all his responses.” Tina Turner.

To be honest, ‘I Don’t Wanna Lose You’ had a limp chorus and was far from her best work. But, Turner, blessed as she was, was allowed to sing about middle-aged women because she was, in fact, a middle-aged woman. We had no problem with the big haired behemoth saying what she liked about her peers. And she was right, they probably did “judge all his responses”.

This week, the responses came from Gregg Wallace. And we have more than an issue with the fruit and vegetable expert and his interpretation of contrition being to say: “I can see [the complaints] coming from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age...”

This was in response to numerous allegations about Wallace that have surfaced over the last couple of weeks, and are currently under investigation. They include the apparent undue sexualisation of, well, most things, and at one point alledgedly parading around almost-naked aside from his fruit and vegetable expertise (which was hidden by a sock).

That sound you just heard was his publicist, and every PR person at the BBC, screaming at their laptop screen.

PR people of whatever age, and middle-class or otherwise, will occasionally have to work with people that regard comms advice the same way Douglas Adams regarded deadlines, ‘I love the whoosh they make as they fly by’.

There’s a Dunning-Kruger Effect in play here, in which the person in question assumes that because they’ve spoken to the public in the past and their career didn’t atomise then they know best. The venerable Mark Borkowski, who has dealt with more PR issues than Gregg Wallace has sampled hot dinners, put it aptly: “I look at Gregg Wallace and see an ego gone rogue, and a strategy only Trump would endorse.”

But how to plan for this? By planning for it. Most of the time you know before the rogue goes rogue that their roguish nature is going to send them to Roguesville. Get ahead of it by expecting it, because, in truth, it’s always the ones you most expect.

Lastly, I wonder what it takes to become a fruit and vegetable expert like Gregg? We had an A La Carte Kitchen at home when I was a smaller human, and I could label all the plastic fruit and veg. Such knowledge could come soon in useful: there may well be a post-PR disaster position going on the BBC’s flagship cooking programme.