Christopher Gray goes on a fun trip to Ibiza where David ‘The Hoff’ Hasselhoff is the boss of a 1990s disco

All hail The Hoff! The Knight Rider and Baywatch TV star delivers all his fans could hope for in the cheesy but always entertaining new musical Last Night a DJ Saved My Life.

Sophisticated it is not. David Hasselhoff does not do sophistication. Instead he delivers a winning line in self-deprecating good humour and – to the surprise of this reviewer – a powerful vocal performance.

The songs that feature – big hits from the 1980s and 90s – are all excellently performed by the young cast, with thrilling visual accompaniment in which eye-popping videos from Rick Skelton play a big part. Some might harrumph at its vulgarity, but writer and director Jon Conway unashamedly celebrates downmarket taste in a way that disarms criticism. Only the po-faced will baulk.

The show comes across as a hybrid of jukebox musical and pantomime – hardly surprising since these are the fields Conway has profitably furrowed in the past. We start at an airport – Luton perhaps – from which a group of revellers are waiting to be flown to Ibiza on a Club 18-30 holiday.

So many are the plugs given to this company that one wonders whether they have financial involvement in the show. Among the travellers are man-hungry slappers – as we are invited to think of them – Shazza and Amber (Emily Penny and Natalie Amanda Gray).

Later we shall hear them referred to as the Ugly Sisters, with the fresh-faced Penny (Stephanie Webber) compared to Cinderella, whom she resembles only in her loveliness. Penny is off to visit the dad she has not seen since childhood, this being Ibiza disco owner and disc jockey Ross (The Hoff), who has been on the island for years, though not so long as to learn that the ‘z’ is not delivered as in zebra. His mispronunciations and failure to handle Spanish are part of the fun, of course, especially in scenes with factotum José (Tam Ryan), a flagrant rip-off of Fawlty Towers’ Manuel.

Though equipped with a young wife himself in the lissom Mandy (Kim Tiddy), Ross is offended by cradle-snatching when Club 18-30 rep and aspiring disc jockey Rik (Shane Richie Junior) starts to court his daughter.

His interest is quite understandable, especially after the obligatory beach scenes in which Penny’s similarity to the Baywatch’s buxom Pamela Anderson is all too evident. This being panto, there has to be a villain, a role gleefully taken by Barry Bloxham as the drug-dealing Ebenezer.

4/5