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.