Life, declares a famous Los Angeleno T-shirt, is a beach. The slogan, as blandly expansive as the Southern Californian coastline itself, could mean anything. It could mean life is one brief thong bikini until the drainage system overflows and gallons of effluent flood you from the storm drains. It could mean life's a ride on double-header surf, but don't tangle with the heroin addicts sleeping rough on Venice Beach.

This being L.A., however, it doesn't. "Life's a beach" means life's a peach and all manner of things shall be well. L.A.'s native essayist, Joan Didion, has remarked that things had better work out in California, "because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."If anything epitomizes the American idealization of this western coastline it is "Baywatch."

To grant readers the compliment of presuming their ignorance, "Baywatch" is a primetime television drama series performed almost entirely in swimsuits. Set among L.A.'s lifeguards, it is popular in America, but more so abroad. Shown in 72 countries, Outer Mongolia included, it has an estimated audience of a billion - higher than any other TV series in history. "We get fan letters from Kuwait,"' says Alexandra Paul, one of the actress-lifeguards, incredulously. "Like, in Kuwait women can't even go out without having their faces covered."

When David Hasselhoff - Baywatch's executive producer and its pectorally-emphasized star, Lt. Mitch Buchannon - was in Britain late last year, he was introduced to the Princess of Wales at a charity reception.

"It was a function with a lot of sirs and ladies, and they were all asking for my autograph," he recalls. "The first thing the princess said to me was: `Good to see you walking again.' So it's quite evident she had been watching the episode in which I was paralyzed making a rescue. I just went, `Wow!' "

"It never rains in Southern California," lies the old song lyric, but sometimes the land of sunshine's sunshine needs a little encouragement. At 8 a.m. on a grey November morning on the Will Rogers State Beach, for example, it needs the wattage of a gigantic sunray lamp.

The glare bounces off David Hasselhoff's chest as he poses, ready for his call, on the steps of a lifeguard hut. "Where did you get this script?" he asks. "From an old `Knight Rider'?" The invocation of his previous TV incarnation as Michael Knight, the secret agent who drove a talking car, leaves an embarrassed silence in the air.

"Anyway, so I was doing this interview with Belfast and they were saying the show was too sexy," he continues. "And I said, `Are you crazy? You guys blow up people in the streets and you're complaining `Baywatch' is too sexy?' "

As we talk, assorted curves and cleavages are being sprayed in the background. "It's Hawaiian Tropical Oil with sunblock factor 6 and has not been tested on animals," says the woman in charge of body makeup. The curves and cleavages slink away, glistening. On "Baywatch," where, as in the rest of California, everything yearns for perfection, sometimes even the sweat is fake.

Like a god descending from Olympus, Hasselhoff steps on to the sand. The camera turns and two idyllically perspiring bodies are set off on a trajectory that inevitably results in a slanting collision with the star. The director asks for a second take. "Why?" asks Hasselhoff. "I thought it was kinda natural."

But if Hasselhoff has missed the point (that naturalism is not the point), his co-star Alexandra Paul, who in an American press interview disarmingly described herself as "the first brunette regular and the first with small breasts," has not. Paul is a perfectly good actress, but her idea of preparing for a scene is to rehearse her hair. "Does my hair look good?" she asks, as vulnerable as a schoolgirl on her way to the prom. A brush-wielding flunky approaches. "Could you leave her alone?" screams the director. "You think this is a movie about a hairbrush?"

If you take the view that grown-ups watch "Baywatch" for any reason other than to gaze at women like Alexandra Paul, then that reason must be David Hasselhoff, the child actor turned daytime soap star, turned vehicular detective, turned lifeguard, turned (he hopes) pop star.

I conduct three interviews with Hasselhoff: one via his fading car phone in England, one on location at Will Rogers, and one in his trailer at the studio. If this sounds impressive it must be said that Hasselhoff has an attention span that would disgrace a grasshopper. None of my interviews lasts more than 10 minutes.

At "Baywatch" he appears to be universally loved. Extras, co-stars, and PR people constantly tell me: If only all stars were like this. He is a great supporter of charities, visits children's hospitals abroad and invites sick children onto his sets.

On the downside, the guy is six feet four inches of rippling ego, manifesting a degree of self-absorption that would be childlike were it not, like his ambition at 41 to make it as a rock star, manifestly adolescent.

In his trailer I ask Hasselhoff, who is already clearing away our lunch plates in an effort to distract himself from the tedium of our encounter, what difference the arrival of Alexandra Paul has made to the series.

"You have to realize one thing," he says. "It's a star vehicle for me. The reason this show is here is because of me. People watch the show because of me. They came with me from `Knight Rider.' They followed my career."

In our interviews Hasselhoff professes himself unimpressed by the charge that the show exploits women's bodies.

"There's an audience for it out there,"' he says, exasperated. "Girls like to look at girls. My wife likes to look at pretty girls and it's not a sexual thing - it's just a natural thing. They just like to look at beautiful girls who are built. In fact, I was always the one who fought against that stuff, surprisingly enough. I came in and said we don't need to shoot cleavage any more and if you have one more long, lingering shot that is tasteless of a woman's breasts or of thong bikinis, then I'm leaving the show because I'm tired of taking crap from the press."

It so happens that one recent episode featured not only the usual quota of "T and A," but a guest star whose deep cleavage burst from a leather catsuit. So how did she slip through?

"Unfortunately I cannot stay on top of everything," he pleads. "I am travelling the world promoting the show, selling the show, pursuing my singing career in Britain - I'm in the charts at number 35, so we're excited - and I saw the same shot and thought, `Whoa!' Well, the first thing I thought was, `She has nice breasts,' and then the second thing I thought was: `We're going to get ---- for this.' "

So why recruit from Playboy? The show's two most spectacularly endowed women, Erika Eleniak, a star of the first two series, and now Pamela Anderson, were Playmates.

"Pamela certainly didn't win the part because of her shape," Hasselhoff says. "People think it's tacky being in Playboy? Well, there are about seven million people a month who love it. And if the show had no women with beautiful breasts and nobody from Playboy, then what else would the press write about?"

What we would write about, being a critical bunch, is the under-representation of L.A.'s 40 percent non-WASP population. Could there not, I ask, be more ethnic diversity among the regular cast?

"I have not met one Hispanic lifeguard in L.A. County," he says. "If there were some, I would do a show about them. We're not trying to do an all-white show here. We are dealing with racial issues all the time. We have a regular who is black. What should I do now? Go find some Hispanics?" (In fact, there are several Latino lifeguards in Los Angeles County and many Hispanic seasonal lifeguards.) "I have worked very, very hard for this career and very, very hard for my musical career, and I never ever, ever gave up and I still get all this: `Why is there so much T and A on the show?' and `Why aren't there more Hispanics?.' Before, it was: `What's it like working with a car?' "

Whatever patience he has ever had for me is thinning.

"I've had three very successful series and massive hit records in Germany and the UK, but it doesn't just happen with a phone call. I've done 9,000 interviews and haven't had a day off in the last six weeks. I am going to sign for two more years on `Baywatch' and then I'll be able to do what I want for the rest of my life and not have to do any more interviews about Playboy and (women's body parts)."

End of interview. Later I talk with Alexandra Paul, who plays Lt. Stephanie Holden, Mitch's boss. Paul is an environmentalist, drives an electric car and belongs to the "zero population" movement that believes we should reproduce only once. She is about to attend a seminar with the actor Henry Winkler (the Fonz on "Happy Days") about the messages TV transmits.

"If I'm in a project that has a message, for example, that all Hispanics are gang members, then I don't want to be a part of it," she says. "There was an episode in which I had a boyfriend who was Puerto Rican and, yes, he was a former member of a gang. I was upset so I rang Gregory Williams (the black actor who plays `Baywatch's' regular policeman) and he agreed that I should be concerned. So I had a meeting with the producers and said that I really found this upsetting. They conceded and said they would change it so that the lead Hispanic wouldn't be from a gang. That was great. But then we got the last script and they had changed it back. But I'd said my piece, and I had a contract with them and I'm not going to ... I felt I had done what I could."

Feminism, Paul says, has not been a "huge thing" with her. She knows some of its etiquette, however, and is pleased to have turned what the script called a "girls only weekend" into a "women only" excursion last season.

"People ask me if I think `Baywatch' is exploitative," she says. "The truth is that people wouldn't turn us on if we didn't show those narrow images of women - they are not wrong, but narrow images. I worry that young girls look at our show and think they have to look like that. The truth is that the camera and good lighting lie a lot. And we are young and work out every day. It actually stipulates in our contracts we have to keep in shape. When I first saw that, I said: `You'd better take that out,' but they said it was for everybody, men and women.

"The good thing is that women in our show are strong characters and we save people's lives. My character is a lieutenant, and I don't even think there is a real woman lieutenant in the L.A. County Lifeguards. We are career-orientated. But I'll concede maybe it would be better if we had different types of people on the show."

These questions are not theoretical for Paul. For 12 years she suffered from the slimming illness bulimia, a condition from which she is "in recovery." She concedes media images of "perfect" bodies may have played their part in her illness.

It has been a long day and Paul is tired. For a few seconds she becomes tearful as she recalls her illness. "I can understand the pain of those young women. I think it is one of the greatest achievements of my life. I can still be driving and think, `I am so glad I'm no longer plagued with that.' "

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Perhaps it is perverse when writing of "Baywatch" to end with "something real," since "Baywatch" is a show predicated upon fantasy. To complain about it, perhaps, is as fatuous as protesting at the lack of naturalism in Grimms" fairytales. Yet, as Paul understands, even fantasy connects with "something real."

We must be fair. "Baywatch's" storytelling may be trite, but it is sternly moral. Its facile optimism need hardly furrow our brows. Perhaps, however, we should consider again the potency of the program's other message, the one contained so seductively in its epitomizing of women as hourglasses. The well-meaning plots exist in blind opposition to this message, but of all the very Californian imperatives to perfection that "Baywatch" celebrates, it is the onus on the attainment of physical flawlessness that persists.

There was a story last season featuring C.J., the lifeguard played by Anderson. In it she agonizes over an offer she receives to take up a modeling career. In the end she turns the chance down because "saving lives is more fulfilling."' Yet what is Pamela Anderson, the ex-centerfold, doing on this program if not playing an animated cover girl, a moving pin-up torn from Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition?

Does "Baywatch" contradict itself? Very well, then, it contradicts itself.

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