Some months ago, my friend Dan told me that his friend Chris, whom I’d met once six years before when they helped me carry a mattress through a door, was working on a TV show about David Hasselhoff. A sort of semi-scripted comedy in which The Hoff would play a fictionalised version of himself, trying to stage his own media comeback (while actually trying to stage his own media comeback). To make it still more postmodern, there would even be a scene where the former star of Baywatch and Knight Rider auditioned against other people to play himself. Well, that sounds like a load of old bunkum, I thought to myself.
A few weeks later, Dan told me Chris needed someone to play a feminist journalist who could have an on-screen argument with The Hoff about his dinosaurish attitudes towards women, and they really wanted me. Clearly this was now a ground-breaking work of cultural significance, so I said yes immediately. They sent me the character brief. “She writes a column for a broadsheet weekend magazine,” it said, “and is not a cliched feminazi, but she does quite like the sound of her own voice.” It is always illuminating to find out what your friends really think about you. I wondered if this had anything to do with the mattress.
My parents were staying with me, so I read the brief aloud to them. The more they laughed, the less convinced I became of its ground-breaking cultural significance. Still, I went to meet the producers, at an address that turned out to be a busy casting agency. Someone ushered me into a room that contained people and film cameras, and handed me a script outline from which to improvise. It was a shock to gather that this was an actual audition. In which I, like The Hoff, was about to be tested on my ability to pretend to be me. Reassuringly, though, there was clearly nobody else who could do it.
The story was that The Hoff had been overheard telling his teenage son he should persuade girls to sleep with him, that no doesn’t always mean no, and this scandal had been leaked to the media. Things got better when they told me that The Hoff couldn’t make it that day, so one of them would play him instead – it seemed easier, somehow, to do this with someone I didn’t recognise. Things got worse when they told me it would be the short Australian lady in the floral tea-dress, so I had to direct all my anger about this beefy man’s sexism towards a woman half my size, who was grinning at me. She wasn’t an actor, she was a producer, helping out. I would just have to get into my stride, and forcefully accuse a small, cheerful woman of misogyny. As I attempted to get my angry feminist journo vibe on, while also trying to say things that were a bit funny, I suddenly realised we were creating comedy around the topic of sexual misconduct, and that this might be misconstrued as A Rape Joke.
Thoughts began to swirl around my head about the resulting Twitter furore – the 48 hours of agonising retweets of righteous indignation to which I would be subjected, by people who hadn’t even watched the programme. I suddenly panicked that pretending to be an angry feminist journalist might be about to jeopardise my actual career as an angry feminist journalist, so I forgot where we were and stopped speaking altogether in the middle of my rant. I asked if we could start again. I’m not entirely sure what happened after that, but everybody was extremely nice and I went home thinking it might have gone quite well after all. Besides, they couldn’t really get anyone else in to play me, could they?
Well, of course they could. And so it was that last week I sat down and watched episode two of Hoff The Record. In which an actor called Anna Crilly, who I am sure is a wonderful person, played a Guardian journalist who had – hang on, she’d written a bloody book now. This was getting worse. The fake me was a higher achiever. And she was funnier. And there was no rape joke. I will even concede that it was surprisingly decent telly. It’s just that I can never ask a man to carry a mattress through a door for me again.
