John Torode has opened up about his relationship with MasterChef co-star Greg Wallace.
While the two have appeared on the BBC cooking show together for almost 20 years, John has previously made no secret of the fact that they don’t socialise with one another outside of work, claiming they’ve “never been friends”.
During an interview on the podcast Desert Island Dishes, John reflected on when he and Gregg first met.
Asked if they “got on immediately”, the chef insisted: “Nah! We got on, but we were work colleagues and we’ve always stayed work colleagues.”
He went on to admit that he does consider Gregg a friend, but added: “How do you define a friend? I think you define a friend of somebody if you’re in a ditch one day and you’re really in, you know, the cacker – you ring them up and you go ‘I need help’ - that’s a friend. Gregg would do that. So, he’s a friend. Don’t get me wrong.
“But I don’t go to the pub with him, we’ve both not been to each other’s houses. We just don’t do it.”
“If he came to my house he wouldn’t know what to do,” John continued. “You know, he’s got this behaviour thing that he does and he knows what to do, so you just let that go. It’s like the reacting into it thing, you just go, you know what, I’m not worried about that and let it go, it’s fine. It’s alright.”
Speaking about the “great respect” the pair have for each other, John concluded: “You know, to get to 20 years as a partnership. I mean, he’s done better than both my marriages. And I’ve done better than his others as well, so that’s alright.”
John previously claimed he’d received a telling off from BBC bosses for claiming that he and Gregg weren’t friends outside of MasterChef.
In 2019, he also spoke of a “disagreement” between them that was “still rumbling on” after over a decade.