The UK culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has said she won’t be watching the latest series of MasterChef on BBC because of the controversy over the conduct of its sacked presenters, but stopped short of saying the broadcaster should not show it.
The first three episodes of the 21st series of the cookery show were released on iPlayer early on Wednesday morning, ahead of the first episode airing on BBC One at 8pm. The BBC website was highlighting the show under the category of “new and trending”.
Nandy told BBC Breakfast: “It’s absolutely not for me, as the culture secretary and a member of the government, to tell broadcasters what they can and can’t broadcast.”
Asked what she thought as a viewer, she said: “As a viewer, I won’t be watching it.”
She added: “I’ve watched MasterChef on and off over the years, but I certainly won’t be watching this series.”
Its hosts, Gregg Wallace and John Torode, were sacked last month after a report into conduct on the show upheld allegations against them.
A report into Wallace substantiated 45 allegations made against the former BBC presenter, including claims of inappropriate sexual language and one incident of unwelcome physical contact. An allegation that Torode had used a severely offensive racist slur was upheld.
Last month, the Guardian reported that Sarah Shafi, one of the contestants in the latest series, had been edited out after she objected to it being broadcast because of the sustained allegations made against Wallace and Torode
In other comments about the BBC, Nandy repeated her call for the broadcaster to “get a grip” after rows over the livestreamed Glastonbury performance from the punk rap duo Bob Vylan and the documentary that featured the son of a Hamas official.
Pressure from Nandy has resulted in Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, having to insist he is still the right person to lead the corporation, after a succession of controversies that have led the culture secretary to accuse him of overseeing a “series of catastrophic failures”
Asked on BBC’s Today programme on Wednesday morning whether she wanted to express confidence in Davie, Nandy replied: “Let me be really clear about this because there has been a lot of reporting around what I have or haven’t said about Tim Davie in particular.”
“It is not my role to determine who works for the BBC. That is a matter for the board. That is set out in the charter. That is part of the independence of the BBC and that is really important.”
Pressed on whether she had pulled back from her previous criticism, she said: “I absolutely believe that the BBC board has to get a grip on the very many failures which they have said to me themselves … the chairman of the board described them to me a catastrophic failings and he was right.”
“When it comes the Gaza documentary and the errors that were made around that, the lack of due diligence,” she added, referring to a BBC documentary about children in Gaza, which was found to have breached the corporation’s editorial guidelines for accuracy by failing to disclose that its child narrator was the son of a Hamas official.
“When it comes to the decision to livestream an act at Glastonbury that was flagged already very high risk and to broadcast antisemitic death chants to the nation for several minutes on a Saturday afternoon – yes, these are catastrophic failures.”