Actors Playing Themselves As Jerks - David Hasselhoff - Hoff The Record

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After a lucrative period of success with Knight Rider & Baywatch as well as his singing career (no accounting for taste) the Hoff was brought down spectacularly by personal problems. A messy divorce, increasing alcoholism and accusations of child-beating led to prolonged absence from the TV screens and many people started to ask ‘Hoff who?’ He made cameos in The Spongebob Squarepants movie and a lame reality TV series called The Hasselhoffs that tried to show he was a good father figure after all. It was cancelled within eight episodes. Hoff The Record is like a twisted parody of the doomed attempt to do the real thing. Bizarrely, it works, mostly for Hasselhoff working with a memorable cast of extreme characters all eager to help him relaunch himself while exploiting him to the max. A real touch of class is the arrival of his (fictitious) love child, played by Mark Quartley, now a gormless grown man from East Germany, supposedly conceived when Hasselhoff was (in reality) playing rock music gigs in Germany as The Berlin Wall was being torn down. The Hoff is reduced to a desperate anything for attention and fame approach to kick starting his stalled-career. He even tries to become the new ambassador and press spokesperson for anti-land mine charity campaign organizations, a role genuinely best associated with Princess Diane. It’s a pretty brave comedy that makes the hypocrisy of celebrity fund raising over land mines part of its story arcing, but Hoff The Record is surprisingly daring, perhaps more so than the Hoff ever was when trying to save drowning swimmers before the rubber sharks closed in. The show has a genuinely penitential feel to it. Hoff comes across like a medieval sinner dragging boulders to Canterbury for his many offences against entertainment, and it is done well enough to earn him a genuine call for his forgiveness and redemption. Youtube - a clip from Hoff The Record Arthur Chappell