I heart Hitlerhoff
My good friend and colleague the charming Tom Doig approached me many years ago about an idea for a show. What I considered to be ridiculous made me think a little , actually …. a lot. He talked about a bastard love child of Hitler and David Hasslehoff. Smashing two icons together has a long and glorious history but something about this particular cocktail I found surreal , disturbing and somewhat exciting.
Hitler: A man caught up in the glory of self -belief and his eventual self-destruction.
Hasslehoff: A man caught up in the glory of self-belief and his eventual self-depreciation.
Baywatch. Nazi Germany .
Economic collapse post WW1 . Economic collapse post Gulf War 2 .
Mobilization of a whole country under the belief of creating Lebensraum . Mobilization of a whole country under the belief of asserting consumer Lebensraum.
The ideas smashed themselves toghter , whizzed around in my head and .. then …. now …. Hitlerhoff is born.
A video of the making of.
The process was great. Squeezing it into the small amount of time both the actor and crew had , we somehow managed to mix and mash together eight creative brains into a melange of a sucrose-laden pop song and Abu Gharib nightmares. Kind of perfect match for this day and age. What was great about this was that we all had experiences of being talked to and advertised at through the messages of the media and we moulded this experience into a show. It was , at the same time, a virtual download and cartharsis of the horrors and turn-ons of mass media and its residual effects as well as look at the rise and rise of ego -driven males towards political power (Hitler, Hoff , Males etc etc)
