Before fashion, there was food.” From such profundity springs Gok Wan’s new show, a break from knocking out cheap frocks for Sainsbury’s.

Happily, this wasn’t How to Cook Good Naked. The single-entendres stayed largely under wraps in Gok Cooks Chinese (Channel 4, Monday 8.30pm), barring one jarring reference to “getting [his] meat out” and a pause-for-effect that yawned into eternity.

He aimed to bust the myth that Chinese cooking is time-consuming and difficult. Considering 1.3 billion people find time for it every day, that’s like busting the myth that pandas breed like rabbits.

If the two-hour marinade for his dad’s char-sui pork didn’t scream convenience, the constant gongs and chop-socky sound effects suggested there were some preconceptions Gok was happy to go along with.

With a running time of just 23 minutes minus ads - and a full recipe for fried rice given before the opening credits had rolled - this was very much takeaway TV. But the frenetic pace made it all rather wearying.

It’s true you can make great Chinese food with little more than Gok’s “holy trinity” of spring onion, garlic and ginger. So it was odd he assumed viewers would then bother with three types of rice vinegar and two types of soy sauce.

And some pearls of wisdom - “Shoes are easier than cooking with your father” - sounded like he’d been poorly translated from a Cantonese original.

Still, this has probably doubled his TV shelf-life. The usual suggestive puns playing on his name also rhyme with the word ‘wok’.