Are you still serving your food on plates?
Loser! Food should be served on rustic wooden boards or wrapped in lettuce leaves because that's what Gok Wan does and he knows what's on trend. "This is how I like to serve food when my girlfriends come over," he said in Gok Cooks Chinese (Monday, Channel 4, 8.30pm) and the results spoke for themselves: not only did the dish look good in a little green lettuce leaf, the rice's self-esteem had never been higher.
All together, it was another example of what Gok Wan does: he zhushes things up and makes everything glittery and happy. He usually does this with clothes and naked women but in Gok Cooks Chinese, he was doing it with food, specifically the food he was brought up on. "I promise you it will be super tasty, really quick and really healthy," he said.
And so off we went to Leicester where Gok and his dad made a green bean salad. Then they looked at pictures of the family from the 1970s. Gok used to work in the family restaurant but, weirdly, there wasn't a single picture of him older than about three years old – I suspect because it would have highlighted an awkward fact about this programme: Gok Wan used to be fat.
This isn't a big secret about Gok – in his late teens he weighed 21 stone – and while there's nothing embarrassing about that, it is confusing that he has made a programme claiming to be about healthy food without addressing why he used to be fat. He has made programmes about weight in the past but if the food he's jabbering on about in this show is so good for us, why did he end up obese?
By not addressing this question, not only did Gok Cooks Chinese feel like cant, it missed an opportunity to get Gok talking about an important subject. Every other food programme on Channel 4 is obsessed with weight and yet this programme – presented by someone who used to be overweight and might have something interesting to say about the issue – ignored it. It was a problem with the format that hissed and bubbled all the way through and in the end fatally undermined the programme.
And then there's the problem of Gok's presentational manner, which is part of a wider issue concerning the way gay men behave on television. With his self-conscious talk of having his girlfriends over and double entendres about "getting the meat out", Gok Wan feels like a weight dragging on the progress being made on the public perception of gay men. As long as someone like Gok Wan is standing in a shop looking suggestively at the handle of a wok, it's going to be hard to prove that most gay men are pretty much the same as everyone else.
Finally, a bit of advice if you're watching the Eurovision Song Contest tonight: watch it with the subtitles on. That's what I did with the semi-finals (BBC Three, Tuesday and Thursday, 8pm) and it revealed some wonderfully eccentric lyrics. Among the best were Montenegro ("I like bicyclism/ I like liberalism/ It is good for rheumatism"), Albania ("I land my plane on the runway of your soul") and Greece, which sounded like a weary comment on the state of their economy: "Oh ooh ooh oh ooh oh oh oh oh ooh."
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