MEETING THE HOFF - DAVID HASSELHOFF

 

We’ve been really lucky over the years meeting some famous people and getting to chat with them. We were reminded recently that in November 2012 we went to a Memorabilia Show where Knight Rider and Bay Watch star David Hasselhoff was topping the bill. The six-foot-four actor/singer certainly drew in the crowds and made his presence known as he met his fans, signed autographs and posed for a sea of photographers.

He also had a good look around the stands buying up some of Knight Rider memorabilia and meeting old friends from the film world. He delighted visitors even more when he held court in the packed Memorabilia Theatre, talking, answering questions, making everyone laugh with his stories and even bursting into impromptu song at the drop of a hat. Undoubtedly if you weren't a Knight Rider fan before, you certainly came away from the show afterwards as one.

 Talking about his role as Michael Knight in Knight Rider which ran from 1982-86 and which is still being shown all over the world, he seemed to have only good memories. “The series Knight Rider has been so good to me,” he said. “It was great fun to work on. We'd have nine cars on the set every day – and we used to wreck them. It was a man's dream, get into them, drive them, wreck them!”

 

He remarked that the car still follows him everywhere. “It's even here today, although if anyone says they have the original, they haven't. I have that at home. For my 60th birthday my staff got me a KITT car, so as I'd got a lot of the original stuff including the dash I had it all re-chromed, put it all together and drive it.”

 He went on to tell the attentive audience that it was necessary to have a stunt man for the scenes where KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand) had to make those incredible jumps.

 David said, “With the jumps, when the car landed, the front end would usually be smashed up and it could have broken the driver's back. It was scary and dangerous. A harness had to be rigged up inside the car for the stunt driver. But I did all the other driving and the fighting.”

 He didn't have anything good to say about the Knight Rider series that NBC later put out. In his usual good-humoured way he said, “NBC developed a TV series but forgot to put me in it!  They didn't get the voice for KITT right which should have been William Daniels – people hated it! They forgot what the show was all about.”

 

David's long career certainly didn't stop with Knight Rider, along came the extremely popular TV series Baywatch in which he played the role of chief lifeguard Mitch Buchannon alongside Pamela Anderson.

 He talked also about his time of being a judge on Britain's Got Talent. “I won't be doing any more judging on Britain's Got Talent, I couldn't understand anybody,” he joked. “Actually, I laid a lot of that on. But if you saw the show, you'd see I was nice to everybody.  I don't want to make people cry. It takes guts to walk onto a stage, so I'm not going to knock them.”

At one point during his talk, I asked him a question over the mic – but I wasn’t quite prepared for his answer though!

 I asked what the highlight of his career has been so far. Straight off the cuff, he answered: “There was this interview with this beautiful journalist. It was the best interview I have ever had. There was this beautiful journalist asking me questions, so I answered them and invited her back to my motorhome, she came in and we....”

With the audience turning to stare, the Hoff grinning mischievously, and me turning beetroot, I was relieved when he got back to the question in hand! “Seriously, it was being at the Berlin Wall on the day it came down. November 9^th 1989. 

"When the Berlin wall came down, I was on a crane singing to a million people on the east and west. I was singing Looking For Freedom and people on either side of the wall were singing along in English. I love East Germany. Their first language was German, their second was Russian. They only learned English through music and songs. The fact that they regularly watched Knight Rider using trash can lids to pick up a signal was amazing.  I'd say being at the Berlin Wall was a massive highlight of my career. The other highlights were the birth of my daughters.”

 And one of our highlights was meeting the Hoff.

MEETING THE HAIRY BIKERS

Selling someone a ropey old motorbike that broke down out on its first ride out, hardly seems the best way to win friends and influence people. But that was exactly the start of a beautiful friendship for Simon King and Dave Myers – better known as the Hairy Bikers. 

The duo are familiar faces on our TV screens with many travel/culinary series under their belts, such as The Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour of Britain; Hairy Bikers’ Best of British; Hairy Bikers’ Asian Adventure and many more. Then there’s Dave on Strictly Come Dancing as well as their publication of a host of cookery books, plus guest appearances at shows and festivals. 

A few years back we went to the Isle of Man for the Queenie Festival – queenies being small scallops found in the waters around the Isle of Man. And who did we spot on the beach cooking queenies – but the Hairy Bikers. Our main interview with them however happened at the BBC Good Food Show at the NEC when we were invited to go ‘backstage’ to talk to them about their lives and career. 

We loved hearing about their early years. The duo have been friends for around 30 years and it all began when they met in 1992 while working on the Catherine Cookson series in the North East of England. Si was the second assistant director and Dave was head of prosthetics, hair and make-up. 

“It was The Gambling Man, Robson Green was in it. Dave had to set fire to him, I had to put him out!” Si told Rob and I in that colourful Geordie accent of his. “We’ve both been into bikes ever since we were kids. Meeting on the Catherine Cookson set, I had this bike I was selling, so I sold it to Dave.”

“Yes, he sold me a remarkably bad motorcycle,” said Cumbria-born Dave. 

“Ah, yes, but it was shiny!” quipped Si.

“Yes, it was shiny but half a mile into my journey it decided to self-destruct. I headed back to Si to get my money back – and we’ve been great friends ever since.” 

As kids, they both had similar childhoods in the fact that motor bikes fascinated them. “We’ve always had bikes, long before we should have,” admitted Dave. “When I was twelve I was bombing around the entries illegally on a motorbike.” 

 As for Si, he was into building bikes from the bits he always found in his Aunt Hilda’s shed. “She lived close to an accident blackspot, and I’m not saying she picked up pieces from the road, but these bike bits were always in her shed. In those days, that’s what you did, built up these bikes.” 

With both of them loving the open road, they teamed up to enjoy a fantastic career travelling the world and trying out the local cuisine on the way.

Si said, “I think learning about a place’s cuisine is probably the best way of learning about the culture of that town or country.” 

On their travels, the pair have certainly experienced a vast range of foods, although Dave pointed out that some of the things they’ve supposed to have eaten are pure myth. However, they both recalled a time in Portugal when Si went for something on the menu that sounded great but turned out to be unwashed, uncleaned crispy pig’s intestines. Not surprisingly the thought of tripe is now his idea of food hell.

And, as it turned out, a loathing for tripe is yet another thing the pair have in common. “I’d say tripe is my food hell too,” said Dave. “My father used to eat raw tripe, soaked in vinegar and eaten raw. The smell was foul.”

Dave said that he really got into cooking during the days he was at Goldsmith Art College in London. “I was a better cook than I was an artist,” he said, adding that it wasn’t a case of baked beans and student food for him. “My cooking was quite elaborate to say the least. I ran up a heck of an overdraft on food, that’s all I can say!” 

“These days when I’m cooking for the family, especially after I’ve been cooking something special for a show, they’re begging me to cook something ordinary. “Please can we just have a burger!” 

Si’s love of cooking stems from when he was a little boy. “My father was a very good cook, both parents were, so I’ve always been around food, I’ve just grown up with cooking. It’s such a natural thing. The best bit about cooking though, is cooking for the people you care about.” 

How true! 

And it was a lot of fun meeting them. 

Thank you Hairy Bikers for taking time out to talk to us!

Meeting Lance Henriksen

 

Lance Henriksen and Millennium co-star Megan Gallagher.
 

One of the nicest actors we’ve ever met, and who we’ve been fortunate enough to interview twice is Lance Henriksen. He is best known for his roles in action, horror and sci-fi movies, in particular Bishop in the Alien films. He also played Frank Black in Fox TV series Millennium. However, his list of films reaches to almost 100 movies, including The Terminator, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Damien, Omen II. Hellraiser, Pumpkinhead – the list goes on.

 

Our interview took place on a balcony at a Memorabilia Show, and Lance was enjoying the atmosphere of the event. “This is so much fun. It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this and its great fun, meeting the fans and talking to them.”

Rob Tysall and Lance Henriksen

 We asked him about his early ambitions to be an actor, to which he replied, “I always wanted to be an actor, even when I was a little kid. When I used to run away from home, I'd go to movies and sit all night watching Kirk Douglas. When I was 16, I tried getting into the Actors Studio and they told me to get lost. I said: 'I'll come back when I'm a man', and I came back when I was 30. I went to sea, I travelled the world ... I was waiting."

 

You can't do every movie - although I do a lot of them - and the thing I'm longing to do is… it's not that I think I'm funny…but I long to do a situation comedy. The challenge for me in a part is if it's something I haven't done. If I'm going to have a rough time doing it, then that's what I'll do. If I'm in the comfort zone, I can't. I have to get off-balance enough to be alive."

 

"I'm pretty slapstick in my life but nobody sees that. You get typecast. I'm from New York and I have a shit-detector that's outspoken. I'm very streetwise and the producers detect that. So, they get me on a movie and kill me. I go into their offices and I'm sure when I leave they say, 'You know, he'd be great to kill'. I've been killed every way you can imagine!

 

“In the Alien films, everything has happened to me. I’ve been ripped in half in the first one. The next one I was chopped up. In Alien vs Predator I was impaled on the Predator’s wristblades.” Laughing Lance added, “They keep bringing me back to life and killing me all over again!

 

Ann in conversation with Lance Henriksen

 “Alien v Predator was made in Prague, made in five months but it was five winter months and very cold, so really what you saw in the film was real, it was very cold. None of the sets were heated, and they were huge sets. None of the scenes were digital except perhaps maybe the crew ship going through the ice because it was impractical to do that in reality.

 

“It was amazing that nobody got hurt on this movie. You’d got this predator – a vast guy anyway but in his outfit, he was eight feet tall. He had to get into training, he had to train like a fighter.

 

“It was the most wonderful ensemble, everybody connected, and we’d all go out to dinner together. And after working with them, you do miss them. Colin Salmon for instance will always be my friend, I made some good friends that I still keep in touch with. I loved doing this film, the writer director Paul Anderson is a lovely guy – a bright, enthusiastic man.”

 As was Lance Henriksen himself!