In a world saturated by big-money publicity campaigns, how can you not be intrigued by a television show as fantastically titled as Hasselhoff vs The Berlin Wall (above)?
Before he began grappling with his demons (burgers and booze), The Hoff was big - I mean really big - in Germany, thanks to some very tight jeans and a short-lived music career. David Hasselhoff's poptastic hit Looking for Freedom reached No 1 in the German charts over a quarter of a century ago, becoming an underground anthem for the repressed East Germans and the fall of that most fearsome and hated symbol of communism, the Berlin Wall. In fact, Hasselhoff was so popular he was asked to perform in front of millions at a New Year's Eve party at the wall, celebrating its fall, in 1989.
Now, with the 25th anniversary of that historic moment approaching, the curly haired "singer" who became famous for chatting to his car takes us back to Berlin, to recall the wall's history and meet people who lived in its long, dark shadow. Aided by archive photos and home movie footage, Hasselhoff vs The Berlin Wall (National Geographic Channel, Thursday at 10pm) tells the stories of the brave souls who ran, swam, climbed, tunnelled and flew their way over the 155km-long barrier to escape their political prison.
And yet the documentary still finds time for Mr Baywatch to belt out the chorus of his hit to slightly bewildered Germans at every opportunity. You get the impression Hasselhoff believes he personally helped put paid to the cold war. While that is clearly ludicrous, there's no denying that the man who once managed to sever a tendon after hitting his head on a chandelier while shaving in a gym will forever be connected to the wall. Let's just hope the anniversary doesn't spark another re-release of that dreadful tune.
Unfortunately for all you Hoff-lovers, King Dave hasn't managed to totally rewrite history and weasel his way into the Birth of Europe (TVB Pearl, Wednesday at 9.30pm), a three-part documentary that reveals how the continent was created by nature's most titanic forces.
The first episode, Water, explores how the colossal fury of water and ice has shaped the continent over thousands of years. A team of intrepid geologists, in a healthy display of plastic anoraks, ventures 250 million years back into Europe's past, to a time when Planet Earth looked rather different. They head deep underground to discover that much of the continent's foundations were created by ancient seas. We'll then hear how mountain ranges have been eroded by great rivers, only to be deposited as new lands hundreds of kilometres away, and learn how vast valleys of solid rock, once covered by kilometres of ice, were carved by majestic glaciers. Finally, we'll go to the frontline in mankind's battle with Mother Nature to discover that, even today, the wet stuff is having cataclysmic consequences on the shape of Europe.