The Beckhams launch the Singles Day TV spectacular in China's Shenzhen, on the evening of Nov 10.

It began as a joke. A group of single university students decided that since they did not have a significant other who would buy them birthday presents or spoil them on Valentine’s Day, they deserved an occasion to treat themselves.

The day they chose for this self-indulgence was November 11 – the date with all the 1s.

The ‘anti-Valentine’s Day’ celebration was first known as Bachelors’ Day. After the initial joke gift- buying day in 1993 at China’s Nanjing University, word spread and other colleges joined in. And in the past five years, as online shopping has taken off, its popularity has snowballed. So much so that today it’s no laughing matter, because Singles Day, as it became known – which expanded to include Taiwan – has become the biggest online shopping day in the world.

This year, the sales once again set new records. Chinese shoppers shrugged off any concerns over a slowing economy and bought 10 billion yuan ($1.47 billion) worth of goods within the first seven minutes after Alibaba's Singles Day online shopping festival kicked off on Friday.

Last year it was ten times bigger than pre-Christmas Cyber Monday in America and dwarves this country’s sales and Black Friday online deals. An estimated 1.7m couriers and postal workers are on standby to deliver about 760m packages from 5,000 warehouses to hundreds of millions of Chinese and international shoppers.

For some UK firms it has turned into one of the most important shopping days of the year, and that’s because it is iconic British brands that lonely singletons in Asia are desperate to get their hands on.

So idolised is everything British that this year’s TV extravaganza, which counts down to Singles Day, was launched by David and Victoria Beckham. They led a glamorous, celebrity-filled event at China’s Shenzhen stadium that is a combination of an Oscars’ red carpet, a huge music concert and a New Year’s Eve-style countdown. The Beckhams were met with screams as the 60,000-strong crowd was whipped into a frenzy to encourage them to spend, spend, spend.

Basketball star Kobe Bryant appeared to toss rocks into a spinning basket in an interactive contest with millions of viewers at home. The US player, who recently retired, is very popular in China.

Later, underwear-clad models for Victoria’s Secret appeared in front of the crowd wearing jewel-encrusted outfits.

On one side of the stage there’s a giant television screen, poised to tot up the billions of yuan as the money rolls in from across China.

As soon as the clock struck midnight, the retail frenzy began. Three-quarters of purchases in that first hour were made by mobile phone as more than 130m people used the sales app.

If sales beat last year, there will be more than 2,000 orders a second.

There will be 40,000 merchants this year selling 30,000 brands from 25 nations.

Scarlett Johansson, left, with Alibaba's Executive Chairman Jack Ma, middle, at this year’s TV extravaganza on Nov 10.