After Baywatch: Moment in the Sun
Disney+
As water-based phenomena go, Baywatch was a tsunami of a television show.
Apparently, it still holds the record as the most watched show of all time, with 1.2 billion weekly viewers at one stage in the 1990s.
Its attraction wasn’t always the quality of the drama, although there were simplistic storylines about the victory of good over evil that held the viewers’ attention.
There was also the stunningly awful episode about an octopus which was ‘hiding lost surfboards in a cave’ and attempted to drown our heroes when they went to investigate.
However, Baywatch will forever be known as the show with the beautiful people who did slow motion running along the beach in their famous skimpy red beachwear.
It was tight Speedos for the washboard abs men and practically hipless swimsuits for the women.
It made several of the actors famous for the rest of their lives, some for reasons easier to understand than others.
David Hasselhoff had the least impressive beach bod, was a terrible actor and worse singer but was central to the show.
Pamela Anderson was the stand-out star, although she didn’t arrive until series three.
Carmen Electra says she still teaches people how to slow-run and Kelly Slater managed to survive the embarrassment of playing a professional surfer by going on to be regarded as perhaps the greatest surfer of all time.
One that got away was a young Leonardo DiCaprio. He was almost cast as Hobie, Hasselhoff’s young son, but the Hoff objected and Jeremy Jackson got the role.
After Baywatch, an NBC production, speaks to almost all the main characters, plus the people behind the project.
One of the creators, Michael Berk, said the idea came to him while smoking a joint with a friend on a California beach.
He watched a lifeguard run from his gantry to respond to an emergency and it dawned on him that no-one had made a drama about the life and death decisions made by the men and women looking after you at the seaside.
He contacted some influential TV friends who didn’t think there was enough to make a series but agreed to support a made-for-TV movie, which was such a hit that they got the go-ahead for the series.
It was a modest success but was cancelled after the first season and poetically true to his character Mitch Buchannon, it was Hasselhoff who save the day by getting new financial backers from Germany where bizarrely he was a major pop star.
It meant a significant drop in budget but the show went on.
Crucially it was the lack of money, Berk explains, which gave Baywatch its most iconic moments.
When the producers had used up their episode budget but were short of the required episode length, they packed out the time with ‘montage shots’ and thus the slow-motion run along the beach was born as a space filler.
The four-part series doesn’t give enough time to the troublesome connection to Hugh Heffner and Playboy and gives too much time to the view that Baywatch was about “compassion and altruism”.
Billy Warlock, who played Eddie Kramer in the early episodes and looks ridiculously good at 63, has a more transactional view of proceedings.
“You had to be pretty, else you weren’t going to be on the show.”
This is supported by another cast member who believes Baywatch filled a role as distraction from the worries of the world.
“You shut the mind off for an hour and looked at beautiful people, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
