Gregg is truly in the ascendant. And of course that means, according to the tao of food TV, another must suffer. Which leads us to Paul and some unfortunate goings-on involving a chicken …

As any regular readers of this column – or passing physicists – will know, there is a finite amount of midlife crisis in the telly-chef community. It can be neither created nor destroyed, only passed from one of them to the other. If Antony Worrall Thompson is regaining composure, then Gordon Ramsay will be losing it. If Gregg Wallace is serene, then Paul Hollywood faces a gathering storm. This is simply science – the First Law of Thermomix.

Imagine how relief mingled with consternation, then, when I noted a resurgent Wallace and his current wife back on the interview circuit a month or two ago, celebrating the recent birth of their son.

Are you roughly up to date with Gregg’s wives? He usually meets them on Twitter, where they tend to write to him as strangers with a question about asparagus (wife No 3, Heidi) or rhubarb (wife No 4, Anna). One thing leads to another, with inquiries about these perennial stalks proving the gateway to a rollercoaster romantic journey, although not always a final destination.

For Heidi, the requirement to micromanage Gregg’s life eventually lost its enchantment. Each day, she was expected to leave the MasterChef host a list of instructions, which included reminding him to eat breakfast, brush his teeth and check BBC News. “Then it will say Twitter,” Gregg once explained, “because I want to tweet twice a day.” The end of the relationship remained inscrutable to him. “I find it all weird,” he told the Mail. “I mean, she came up to the flat in London last week to change my sheets. I honestly can’t get to the bottom of it.”

Heidi’s unfathomable departure left a vacancy, and, as indicated, new parents Gregg and Anna are now giving joint interviews to OK! magazine. Naturally, there was the odd alarm bell. Information Gregg chose to share with OK! readers was that he missed “physically loving” his recently postpartum wife. “In fact, Anna’s been the one to try and rush that side of things,” he went on, “and you might expect it to be the other way around.”

“It’s all getting back to normal,” Anna soothed. “It won’t be long before you can chase me round the kitchen.” But, all in all, the artisan greengrocer’s fortunes are in the ascendancy.

It has been reported that a standoff seems to be developing over a Range Rover and a pink-beaked chicken called Karen

So if he’s up, who’s down? Judging by a welter of reports and Instagram posts, dignified and otherwise, it’s Bake Off host Paul Hollywood, 53, a man as at home criticising the soggy bottom of a cake as he is admiring the chassis dynamics of a Kawasaki Ninja 1000.

Alas, it seems Paul’s relationship with 24-year-old Summer Monteys-Fullam has come to an end, a disputed number of months after he met her in a pub while organising his now-former wife’s birthday party. The inciting incident is reportedly Paul asking Summer, apparently out of concern for her behaviour in front of paparazzi, to sign an NDA about their relationship.

Quite a lot to unpack there. And, for Summer, to pack. All her belongings into a removal van, in fact. Returning to their once-shared property, too, has gone less amicably than it might, with friends of Summer reporting that Paul greeted her with the words: “Why don’t you fuck back off on that horse you rode in on?”

The inquiry is chiefly noteworthy because it appears Summer may well have literally ridden in on a horse. Indeed, horses are some of the things he bought her that Paul is supposedly relaxed about her keeping, although it has also been reported that a tense standoff seems to be developing over, among other items, a Range Rover Sport (valued at £100,000) and a pink-beaked chicken called Karen (valued at £35). And yet, who can put a value on either beloved livestock or a performance SUV widely judged one of the most capable on the market? As one US AutoTrader review of the model puts it: “To describe the supercharged 5.0-liter V8 merely as an engine does it a disservice.” I’m sure you could say much the same of the chicken.

But back to the headline business of the NDA, which specifically recalls the plot of a season nine Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. Have you seen this one? Has Paul? To summarise, Larry has become concerned by his girlfriend’s ability to make other women laugh with her unflattering descriptions of past lovers’ crooked penises, bedroom kinks and so on. Anyway, one night they’re sitting in bed and she is asking Larry what he’d do sexually, right now, if he could do anything at all. A guarded pause. “I just like to get an erection and put it in a vagina.” “That’s it?” she says disappointedly. “That’s your biggest fantasy?” “I would just get on the top,” he nods carefully, “and … thrust until orgasm. I’m sexually a very simple man. BUT … there is something that can change that.”

Yes, it seems that if she were to just do this one thing, she could access a whole new level of extremely hot Larry David filth. But what thing? “I’ve got something that’s pretty interesting,” Larry promises with a twinkly smile, and out from beneath the bed, he pulls … an NDA. “Is this a joke?” she demands. “No,” comes the reply.

Which is one way to provoke someone into breaking up with you there and then. Back to the matter in hand, it is unclear if Paul recreated the Curb tribute in every detail as he sought to establish the media boundaries of his own relationship. According to what Summer’s friends are telling various newspapers, she actually thought she was being proposed to, when instead the NDA was produced. Unfolding an NDA from a ring box feels a little sledgehammer for Curb, but, hey – I don’t mind this version of the scene either.

Either way, and just as it was with Larry, it seems Paul’s rearguard action may be shutting the stable door after the horse (valued at £3,000) has bolted. On the Curb episode, it isn’t long before someone casually reveals that Larry is already known around town as “Larry Long-Balls”. And a look at Summer’s Insta finds a commenter suggesting she could write a book about what has happened, only for madam to reply: “Funnily enough, I’m actually really thinking about it after everything I have been through and am still going through lol.”

That she will be lol-ing all the way to one of the second-tier reality formats seems fairly inevitable. In the meantime, Paul is reminded of the immutable law. It’ll be one of the other’s turns on the midlife crisis soon enough, with the Hairy Bikers warned to take nothing for granted.