How to accurately summarise the experience of meeting David Hasselhoff? When I step into his trailer it’s his final day filming new show Hoff The Record and the firm handshake and magnificent hair are much as expected, as is the slow realisation that I am being sucked into a disorientating cultural vortex inside which David Hasselhoff and his exquisitely realised, intensely meta alter-ego “The Hoff” have formed two distorted versions of each other, each with no beginning and no end: the perfect Möbius strip of modern celebrity. Really, however, the best way of summing up my encounter is to say that it takes David precisely nine seconds to present me with a T-shirt with his own face on it.
“GREAT STUFF!” bellows this lovably ludicrous 62-year-old as he hands me the garment. “I’ve got loads more back at the hotel!” Then he gestures towards a half-sofa, half-“banquette” of the variety popular in this sort of vehicle. “SIT THERE!”
For a decade spanning the 1980s and 90s, in Baywatch and in Knight Rider, David Hasselhoff was the king of telly. His walk-on role in the fall of the Berlin Wall is, of course, well documented. Since then Hasselhoff has spent even longer playing The Hoff, and it’s The Hoff you’ll see in semi-improvised comedy Hoff The Record, which is somewhere in the middle of Curb, Alan Partridge and Toast Of London. The first episode follows our hero as he arrives in the UK and fails to get a part in a Hasselhoff biopic.
Hasselhoff explains that, in common with many other plotlines in Hoff The Record, the idea of coming to the UK for work isn’t that far from reality. “I went where the money was – and that was here,” he tells me, gesturing outside the trailer. (We’re in an industrial estate near Stansted Airport.) “I said: ‘What’s a panto? Let’s try it out!’ BOOM! We broke attendance records and now I’m on my fifth one. The good thing with panto is, when you say no, they up the price! I mean you also have to know that sometimes when you say no they’ll fire you! That’s happened to me as well: ‘I said no? I MEANT YES!!!’”
In fairness, it’s hard to believe David is intimately acquainted with the word “no”. Alongside Hoff The Record he’s also been working on a film called Killing Hasselhoff and something he describes as “a Hoffywood musical”, as well as a tour called Celebrate The 80s And 90s. Then there’s his part in Swedish martial arts movie Kung Fury, and it goes without saying that David appears in Sharknado 3. He’s also in the forthcoming Ted 2, he adds, “but I’m not playing The Hoff, I’m playing David Hasselhoff.”
In fact he’s probably playing The Hoff playing David Hasselhoff, which is also, I eventually decide, the chap sitting in front of me today. “I have no idea what I’m doing!” he laughs. “Every weekend something new comes up.”
Initial interest in Hoff The Record came from BBC2, which put up cash for a taster tape. When BBC2 decided not to pick up the show, the Dave channel wisely stormed in; the difference between the original tape and the footage I’m shown today is huge. This show is extremely funny, and considering the team have worked on The Thick Of It, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa and The Inbetweeners, it should be.
The Hoff disappears to prepare for a scene with Simon Greenall, whose face is recognisable as Michael in Alan Partidge, and whose voice is unrecognisable as every single one of the Compare The Meerkats. In this scene, The Hoff shares a massage with an eastern European warlord, and there’s a joke about a finger going up a bumhole.
While that’s happening I ask Krishnendu Majumdar, who’s showrunning Hoff The Record alongside partner Richard Yee, if he feels like he’s actually spent time with David, rather than The Hoff. “Off camera he’s a level-headed, generous guy,” Krish explains. “He has a real enthusiasm for life and we’ve all grown very fond of him. If he was an arsehole, it wouldn’t work. He’s always doing something. He won’t stop. Just will not stop.”
Clearly, David Hasselhoff is working like he’ll never work again, principally because having stared career oblivion in the face once he’s not keen on revisiting it. But back in the trailer I ask him if he grows tired of The Hoff. “The Hoff makes more money than Hasselhoff,” he says. “So I just go where The Hoff goes. Also it’s SO MUCH MORE FUN.”
Perhaps, I suggest, if The Hoff does ever want to smash the walls of his postmodern self-incarceration, he needs a Travolta-in-Pulp-Fiction moment. Inevitably there’s a story to go with that.
“Straight after that film, Quentin Tarantino said in a newspaper: ‘The next guy I’m going after is David Hasselhoff.’ Soon after that I saw him at the Golden Globes. And I said: ‘Well, here I AM!!’ We were at the urinal at the time. I’ve run into him three or four times now. I keep reminding him: ‘HELLO!!!’”
He doesn’t seem too bothered by Tarantino’s indifference and, perhaps, nor should he be: things are working out well right now for David, or The Hoff, or whoever this man might be. “It’s like a tsunami of Hoff!” he roars as I pick up my T-shirt and bid farewell. “The Hoff just keeps getting bigger!”
Hoff The Record begins tonight (18 June), 9pm, on Dave
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