A knight in shining armour

WHICH version of The Hoff is your personal favourite?

There are so many to choose from, it’s hard to know where to start. Eighties hairy-chested pin up dude in teeny weeny Speedos? Leather clad rock dude, belting out very soft rock anthems? Beefy beach dude in slo-mo action shots with Pamela Anderson? Macho heroic dude with a talking car? Z-movie star of such cinematic giants as Anaconda 3: Offspring, and more recently, Piranha 3DD? Transatlantic talent show judge? Pantomime star across the UK, usually in the role of Captain Hook?

Perhaps your favourite is that classic cameo in 2004’s stoner epic — sorry, kid’s film — Sponge Bob Square Pants.

Or for something grittier, there are those drunken home movies, of which Hasselhoff was the unwitting — and unremembering — star.

Or then again, maybe it was how he single handedly brought the Cold War to an end. That was quite something, no? There’s nothing The Hoff can’t do. Just scrolling through his website – the, erm, Hoffspace — is exhausting. He has more than 420,000 followers on Twitter (typical fan tweet, retweeted by the great man himself: “The Hoff offering a retweet is like the Pope offering a blessing”). He tweets photos of his decades-younger girlfriend posing in hotpants, captioning his admiration underneath, as if to say, “Look what I got!” And yes, he refers to himself in the third person as The Hoff. But can he cure leprosy? Raise people the dead?

It’s hard not to be a tiny bit tongue in cheek about David Hasselhoff. A bit, you know, ironic. There’s that hair, for a start. He is the man for whom the term cheesy was coined, yet thanks to his ubiquity, his Tigger-like eagerness to be everything to everyone everywhere all at once, over decades upon decades, he has worn us down.

There is nothing the man won’t do. Bad films, corny television series, reality television, stage appearances, rock concerts, album recordings, multiple cameos as himself, pantomime roles (he’s in Manchester later this year), plus an Edinburgh festival show about what fun it is being David Hasselhoff. No matter how badly he screws up — and he does, big time — and no matter how terminally naff he is — and he is, big time — we still can’t get enough of The Hoff. Quite simply, he has eroded our will to dismiss him. We should know better, but he has worn us down. We have given up trying to get rid of him. We know he’s dreadful, but we can’t help ourselves.

Even hitting 60 on Jul 17 is not slowing him down. David Hasselhoff was born in Baltimore, Maryland. You know, like the edgy film maker John Waters, and the edgy TV series The Wire. Here the similarities stop. Hasselhoff is as edgy as a fat German sausage. And oddly, just as popular, at least in Germany, hence his claim to have reunited East and West during the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The clue is in his name — Hasselhoff is of German parentage, and was already a singing star in Germany and Austria during the Eighties, when he thought it would be a good idea to cover a Seventies German hit, renaming it “Looking For Freedom” and singing it in English. His timing was impeccable.

As Berliners on both side of the wall began hacking chunks out of the despised symbol of repression and division, The Hoff’s song went — and stayed — at Number One in West Germany. The album of the same name also topped the charts, and Hasselhoff was invited to perform on New Year’s Eve on top of the remains of the Berlin Wall, to almost a million East and West Germans. Such was his popularity as a singer there that one newspaper ran the headline, “Hasselhoff: Not Since The Beatles.” He later suggested that he had been instrumental in bringing about reunification, and voiced his sadness at not having been included in the museum at Checkpoint Charlie.

Non-Germans may not have been aware of his role in such intricate diplomacy. We only knew The Hoff from the Eighties futuristic series Knight Rider, which featured — gasp — KITT, the talking car. In terms of technology, it blew the Six Million Dollar Man out of the water. A car that could talk? Operated by a man with hair so big it needed its own trailer? As if this could not be improved upon, Michael Knight was soon reincarnated as Mitch Buchannon in early Nineties babe-fest Baywatch, and Hasselhoff got into the Guinness Book of Records for being the ‘Most Watched TV Star in The World’.

Of his 11-year stint on Baywatch, he said that the series had “enriched, and in so many ways, helped save lives”. He added that he was looking forward to another project “which has had such significance for so many”. (Would it be churlish to point out that the significance of Baywatch for so many perhaps involved private moments recalling those slo-mo shots of Pammy in her red cossie?)

The Hoff, like God, is omnipotent. He’s everywhere, and there is nothing he has not done. He has appeared in lead roles in stage versions of Jesus Christ Superstar, Grease, and The Rocky Horror Show. He began his career playing a doctor in a long running soap opera, The Young And The Restless from 1975 to 1982, which made his name — he popped up as himself, the first of many cameos, in Diff’rent Strokes in 1984, before ever driving a talking car. In later years, he has not been above self-parody — think the Sponge Bob cameo, and his appearance in the movie Dodgeball, where he sent himself up perfectly.

He has a tendency to send himself up off screen too, thanks to his raging alcoholism. His second marriage to Pamela Bach, with whom he has two daughters (Taylor Ann and Hayley Amber, both now in their early twenties) was something of a car crash by the time it ended in 2006 after seven years; he was granted custody of both girls as his ex-wife was repeatedly charged with drink-driving. Yet he too was filmed drunk and insensible by one of his daughters; the film was made public in an effort to shock Dad into sobering up properly. He has had numerous trips to treatment centres, but has a history of relapsing. He is currently sober.

Ever bomb-proof, The Hoff’s relentless drinking did not harm his career in the way it demolished Mel Gibson’s — probably because people like him a lot more. Instead, he got himself a cute Welsh girlfriend half his age — also called Hayley — whom he met when she asked for his autograph at the Cardiff leg of Britain’s Got Talent. They’ve been together over a year, and he has allegedly proposed three times. She said no. That’s right. She turned down The Hoff. Clearly, the woman is deranged. He continues his Godlike path into his sixties, hair and teeth as spectacular as ever.