The other night I forced myself on David “The Hoff” Hasselhoff. It was not my finest five seconds.

One minute the Baywatch actor was walking through the crowd at a function in my direction – strikingly big and hyper-real. The next my hand had shot out and I was introducing myself. Once the introduction was over (famous people don’t need to explain themselves), an aching void of nothingness opened between us. Never having seen Baywatch and fleetingly forgetting his other seminal work, Knight Rider, I was at a loss for words. It turned out he had already been waylaid by many equally gormless people. So he politely smiled and took his carefully coiffed self off.