For lovers of slow-motion jiggling everywhere, it’s the fourth season of Baywatch; a quite remarkable confection of sea-based melodrama, intercut with soft rock video montages and lots (and lots) of running.
Made at a time before David Hasselhoff discovered irony, the Hoff takes the lead with a dewy-eyed conviction in the homespun American values of the show. Whether counselling his son on girl matters or squaring off to his ex-wife’s fiancée, he injects every moment of contrived sentimentality with a hyper-sincerity that only adds to the camp factor.
Mitch Buchannon isn’t just a hero; he’s an all-American hero – the one moral touchstone in a world of absent, careless or neglectful fathers – and it’s Hasselhoff’s relationship with his son, Hobie, which, even more than Pamela Anderson’s breasts (rather sidelined this season), is at the heart of the show.
The young Jeremy Jackson acts Hasselhoff off the screen; but you knewthis already, and you won’t be buying this boxset for the performances. Instead, it will be to savour such retina-searing delights as Buchannon posturing his way through an Iron Man competition, practising Far Eastern meditation and histrionically battering a punch bag. And when it’s not Hasselhoff hammering home the moral beats of the narrative, it’s the children teaching the adults the true meaning of community and responsibility. When Hobie falls in love with a terminally ill girl, the incessant power ballads only reinforce the chocolate box pathos of the storyline. Even near-death experiences, in this show, are depicted as hairspray adverts.
In the midst of all this, there are plane crashes, sea hijacks and arms smugglers: the villains usually distinguishing themselves from the Barbie doll regulars by daring to wear pony tails and facial hair, except where they’re smooth-talking threats to the virtue of the swimsuit-clad female characters.
But it’s not the hokum-of-the-week storylines which will keep you watching these 22 episodes: it’s the clunky moral messages (‘a rescue can is not a toy’) and, above all, the sheer joy of seeing Hasselhoff single-handedly redefining what television acting can be. Wearing a look of quizzical bewilderment as he gazes into the middle distance, this is a man who, despite all material evidence to the contrary, believes the world to operate according to the same childlike rules of cause and effect as he carries with him, confusedly, in his head. It’s not acting and it’s not drama. But for a certain kind of deluded chutzpah, you can’t fault him.
Released on DVD on Monday 25th July 2011 by Network.