The Hoff - saved by his very own Saffy

Poor old David Hasselhoff - his catchphrase, "Don't Hassle the Hoff!" looks less feasible than ever this week. Even his teenage children have started having a go at him for being a washed-up old drunk. Not content with the levels of humiliation created by his recent attempt to get back into the pop charts with a song ominously entitled "Jump In My Car" (the accompanying video made him look, as my friend put it, "a bit rapey"), he has now been caught on camera rolling around at home in Las Vegas, too intoxicated to retain a firm hold on his hamburger, let alone his career. What's shocking is that it seems it was his daughter who filmed the tape.

The video was shown on United States tabloid TV last week, revealing the former star of Baywatch and Knight Rider (pictured, right) sprawling around wearing only a pair of jeans, while his 16- year-old, Taylor-Ann, can be heard saying, "Dad, you need to promise me you're not gonna get alcohol tonight, OK? If you get alcohol tonight you're fired from your show tomorrow. And a doctor's coming over here in the morning to check your alcohol level and if there's any alcohol in your system you're gonna be fired from the show. Tomorrow. You hear me? No alcohol."

There is little response from the hamburgerly-challenged Hoff, too busy fondling his disintegrating dinner to utter more than a word that sounds rather like "chicken". Of course, home videos were designed so proud dads could film their children taking their first steps, not so that the child could film their father rolling on the floor like a two-year-old. And yet, the Hoff is merely the latest in a long line of reckless parents whose self-raising children have to do all the shouting. "They tuck you up, your lass and lad," as Larkin almost said, "they may not mean to, but who else is going to naffing well do it?"

Referred to in therapy circles as the "parentified child", this stern figure is better known as Saffy from Ab Fab, who labours in vain to keep her legless fashionista mother molly-coddled, not Bolly- addled - and many other famous fathers do 'ave em.

Martin Amis was complaining in his last round of press interviews that his antismoking daughters watch him "like snipers" in case he so much as looks at a cigarette. And if only Sir Paul McCartney had listened to Stella, who didn't want him to marry Heather Mills in the first place, he'd have been saved from a multimillion pound divorce battle. Not to mention how King Lear could have heeded Cordelia's soothsaying and avoided all that trouble about a noose. Disciplinarian daughters? No celebrity should leave home without one.

Yet there's hope for the Hoff still - if only he takes a leaf out of Danny DeVito's book. The diminutive one was recently recorded making a drunk and slurring appearance on ABC TV and blaming his state on having had too many limoncellos.

A few months later, he's not only risen from the ashes of his shame, but he's cashing in by launching his own brand of the lemon- flavoured liqueur. So even if the Hoff did get fired when the breathalyser men eventually came, he has a bright new future in front of him - as the famous face behind the all-new, disintegrating Hoffburger. Just don't ask his daughter to appear in the advert.

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