I hear him before I see him. I am standing in a terrifyingly long antechamber in the Union, with a brown wooden table extending from one end to the other. “Jump in my car, I wanna take you home” travels down the corridor in gruff tones, before he has even reached the door.

‘He’s coming’, I think. ‘Oh god, I am about to meet The Hoff’. And suddenly he’s in the room, all 6ft 4 of him, and he’s raring to go. “Alright guys, let’s get it on, let’s do this” he projects as he shakes hands and hears names, and asks me twice what Cherwell is.

“The independent student newspaper at Oxford,” I reply. My voice comes out lower and smoother; I am subconsciously trying to sound as together as him. “I’m fine with my coat on so let’s go,” he says, dismissing the small flurry behind him. He asks me where I want him to sit, and then whistles away as he lowers himself into, of course, the seat at the head of the table. He looks immaculate. Dressed in a dogtooth patterned jacket, with an open black shirt and pristine hair, he is exactly the vision of immortality I had envisioned. The gravitas was shed a little, later, when he was to reveal the inside of his jacket. His own face peered out, with curved writing which read ‘Don’t Hassle the Hoff.’ A commitment to the cause.

For indeed, although I met the Hoff, although I was able to sit extraordinarily close to the very large man, and watch as his strangely bright eyes flashed left and right and piercingly at me, he was almost always the Hoff. He was always the slick façade. He spoke easily, with inflection, and comfort, but all with a practised, rehearsed air.

Currently Hasselhoff is starring in a touring musical which you might have seen advertised on George Street: Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. Hasselhoff depicts it as “an adult panto,” and certainly it sounds every inch ridiculous, amusing, and predictably Hoff-like. There is an implicit acknowledgement of the power he has. He narrates, “we had to let the audience take over because we had no choice”, before declaiming that “it’s great, we are excited about it – we love the audience participation.” He seems hesitant to speak ill of the audience’s involvement in any way, clarifying and repeating his love for it. Unsurprising, really, when the value of the Hoff is so much an accolade to his fans, and their relationship with his self-parodic presentation.

I query whether being onstage is more detrimental to the performance when the audience is undoubtedly full of rather loudly excited fans. “It’s overwhelming,” he agrees, “and distracting, but we always turn it into gold”. Since the run of Last Night a DJ Saved my Life began in October, he says that “there’s only been a couple of stupid comments.” He describes his resilient internal monologue each time someone makes a ‘stupid’ comment. “In my head I go ‘Shall I nail this guy?’, because I’ve got stupid comebacks in my head that are good, or shall I just go on?” Usually, he “just go[es] on.”

Predictably, the audience has mainly consisted of women. But he notes that “a surprising number of men from the Knight Rider days come in.” There was one guy that came to see the show that he recalls with particular fondness. “You find these guys all singing along, even the big hitters. I got a guy who flew in in his own helicopter”; he suddenly laughs, a loud singular ‘HA’. “He’s a data processor, he’s just very rich and very cool and he brought his buddies all over and they had a bunch of drinks and they were just singing along”. There seemed to be a little bit of the Hoff in this data processor, and Hasselhoff laughs again with almost fondness in recalling a rich buddy drinking singing along to him.

The whole interview is punctuated with instantaneous automated laughs following any joke or anecdote. He smiles and returns to his barking tone – “and this is really what it is, it’s a singalong musical”. The musical sounds grossly corny, and Hasselhoff acknowledges this before suddenly quoting the musical, singing “look into my eyes”. I do exactly that, but his eyes flitter, uncreased, observing the room.

He suddenly remembers a mistake. The seemingly infallible Hoff, I learn, makes mistakes. In this corny singalong musical, it turns out that there are sporadic and unexplained references to Baywatch. A couple of nights ago he explains, “I forgot the – I forgot the lyrics…to the Baywatch theme song”. His tone changes and incredulous disbelief spills through. Suddenly he is singing again, “So people stand in the darkness”, describing how onstage at this point he stopped and exclaimed, “Whuh”. His faithful audience carried the line on for him, singing, “Afraid to step into the light”. He chortles again. Whenever Hasselhoff mentions lyrics he sings them, in his tuneful shout-singing twang which I cannot describe in fewer words. It’s pleasant and a little scary. I do not think the Hoff is actually capable of singing softly. I’m not so sure he would want to either.

He carries on, “Frankly we thought we were going to get killed in the ratings because I’ve done […] Broadway, I’ve done Chicago on the West End”. He begins to sound more serious. “And I’ve done The Producers with Mel Brooks and I’m very honoured to say I’ve done that, that’s pretty heavy company, Mel Brooks, to be working for him.” He describes Jekyll and Hyde on Broadway as “intensely difficult and very anxious, scary, great”. There is a great, sincere respect in his voice for Brooks. But then he flips back to the tomfoolery of the present – “Stage is a safe place; you know what is in front of you, you know who’s to the back of you. Even though I fell through the stage the other night.”

“How!?”, I cannot help but punctuate this casual comment. “I almost did it again!” he says whilst laughing. It turns out it was less falling through the stage than off the stage. His fallibility increases. In a scene where he had sunglasses on for what he aptly describes as “this Baywatch thing,” and as he turns around and sings “some people stand in the darkness,” (he’s singing to me again), he decides that the audience are too “laid back.” Hasselhoff comments, “I wanted to wake them up, and there was a gap between the stage and the speakers about this big” (he mimes wildly and widely with his large, tanned arms) “and we put a line there but I had my glasses on and I totally forgot about it and BAM – I went all the way through.”

Of course he gets up and continues just the same, but he notes that it’s another hit to “the same knee I’ve been nursing for a while”. He brushes off the sombre acknowledgement of his age with an “anyway,” wrapping up his comments on the show with a placid comment about it all being “fun”.

I want some real David, I decide. Let’s get to the gritty stuff. The Press Officer mimes for me to wrap up. “I want to ask you some questions that you’re not going to be normally asked,” I announce. “I want to talk about things that are David Hasselhoff rather than the Hoff, so I’m going to ask some regular boring questions.” “Just the one question!” the Press Officer interrupts. Right.

I smile at Hasselhoff, who raises an eyebrow. I raise one of mine back, and ask what he had for breakfast this morning. “What did I have? I had –“. He stops, puzzled. “Wow, this morning I actually didn’t have breakfast.” Have I cracked the real David? He no longer soars, rehearsed, through the air. “Um, I didn’t have breakfast, I had coffee.” He darts into an explanation of why he could’ve possibly missed breakfast. “I was up until 4:30am watching American football and I slept through breakfast so I went on until lunch,” he laughs, as if astonished by his own craziness. “So, I, um, started with lunch at – wait, what did we do at 11 o’clock? Something at 11.”

He furrows his brow, unable to detail what he did at 11 o’clock. However, lunch, he reassures me, he did eat eventually – “pasta carbonara and a salmon,” if anyone was wondering. “It was American football play-offs” he justifies again. “That’s fair enough”, I falsely reassure him, as if I had at some point done the same. And with that he’s swept away, murmuring, “What did I do at 11 o’clock? Something happened at 11 – what happened?” He stands for a moment – and then grins, “Oh I know, I had a really great massage” and then he chuckles one last time, and I join in. I sit, and he stands, and we chuckle. And then he says, “Thanks, cheers!” and he’s off. And I leave, certain of having met the Hoff, but uncertain of much else.

Dr Charles Foster is many creatures; a teacher of medical law, a qualified vet, a legal philosopher and a practising barrister. He is also a fox, a badger, a deer, an otter and a swift.

That’s right: for the last 15 years, Foster has spent extended periods of time living as an animal. He has lived in a sett, eaten out of bins, slept under bushes. Perhaps if he were poor, or lacked the eloquence honed by years at the bar, he might be considered mad; as it is, his recently released book on his experiences, Being a Beast, is receiving rapturous reviews.

I meet him in an attempt to understand what drives a respected Oxford tutor to spend weeks living in a hole, eating worms. He is warm and self-deprecating, and extraordinarily earnest. “I was concerned that none of my relationships were real, that I was perpetually at crossed purposes with all the worlds of people who I regarded as my best friends and my family,” he tells me.

“I wanted some sort of reassurance that it was possible to know the other, and one way of testing that is to see if it’s possible to have a relationship with a member of another species. If it’s possible to have a relationship with a member of another species then perhaps there are grounds to be assured that I know my wife or my children or my best friends.”

In its current form, this is a highly philosophical project building on his academic work on identity and human dignity. In a different sense, though, this is something Foster has been working on his entire life. I ask him when he started being an animal. “I think I started probably as soon as I emerged from the uterus. Children crawl around pretending to be lions and tigers; children go to bed every night with a cuddly teddy bear, a member of another species. We don’t think that’s odd; we think it’s human normality, so human children recognise this basic Darwinian fact of our relationship with other species. As soon as we grow up, we grow out of that knowledge, disastrously.”

By his own admission, Foster did grow up disastrously. There is a measure of regret in his voice as he describes his life before becoming a beast. After training as a vet and a lawyer, Foster emerged as “a proud, arrogant, swashbuckling, hunting barrister. I used to get the train north to Fort William every autumn to stalk in very nice lodges. Field sports were a big part of my life. Looking back on it I think that probably was – at a level which I didn’t acknowledge at the time – a quest for intimacy with the natural world. But it took a really perverted form. Do you really establish a relationship with something by going out and trying to kill it? That itself is a psychopathic state of mind.

“Since I was a child I’ve been a passionate naturalist; I’ve always marinated myself in the natural world and I’ve always at some level been aware that I needed it. But I never seriously countenanced the possibility of a two-way, of a reciprocal relationship with it, until I – as I rather histrionically put it in the book – put down my guns and took up my tofu.

“We’re not talking about a Damascus Road conversion here; we’re talking about a gradual evolution away from predatorhood towards – not victimhood, but towards acknowledging that an essential part of my self-description is ecological.”

For Foster, an important component of this exercise is revealing the animal within each of us. “The title of the book, Being a Beast, is deliberately ambiguous. It could and in most people’s eyes at first blush does say, ‘This is a project in which I go out and try to transform myself into a beast.’ But the better way of understanding it is something like, ‘Being a beast, I picked up a cup of espresso macchiato [we are talking over coffee] and drank it in a beastly sort of way.’

“So, I would like to think that the book is trite, that it is simply saying in a poetical and exploratory way what Darwin told us all 150 years ago. So the best possible reception for this book, as far as I’m concerned, will be for people to shrug and say, ‘Yeah, obviously. Tell us something new,’ and to acknowledge in themselves that this was so obvious as not to need saying.”

I sense a considerable level of concern over how the book is received. Foster’s is a story that is all too easy to sensationalise; a review of his book in The Guardian describes him simply as “the man who ate worms like a badger.” Foster wants to stress that it is about more than this. “It’s actually not very interesting to have a description of what worms taste like. If you want to know what worms taste like, the best way of doing it is to go into your back garden and eat some, rather than have Charles Foster tell you what they taste like. All that tells you really is what suite of adjectives Charles Foster has about his palate.” This is a project is about empathy, understanding and self-recognition, but I’m too curious not to ask about the practicalities of becoming a beast. A trained vet, Foster found out all there was to know about the physiology of the animals he was to imitate, but it was the simple steps that made the greatest difference. “One way of doing this is to unwind the few million years of evolution in which I have been a biped by simply dropping six feet to the ground. Six feet – a couple of million years. That physical act makes you necessarily a less visual animal, because there’s not so much to see down there, because there’s often grass up to and above your eye level.

“There are various ways of reconditioning your nose to make you a more olfactory animal, so I describe in the book how before I went into the woods I tried to rekindle my nose, so I would burn joss sticks of various sorts in different rooms of the house, blindfold myself and try to navigate myself around the house by the smell. I’d put different types of cheese in each corner of the room and after disorientating myself, try to orientate myself by reference to the cheese. And it is interesting how effective those things are. Human noses are actually surprisingly good.

“When I was being a badger, it was about eyelevel olfaction, trying to learn a scent landscape, learning how the tides of scent shift up and down the valley, learning how scent oozes from the ground as the sun hits it, learning how smell bounces like an echo off the walls of the valley, trying not to translate everything that I received through my nose into a visual metaphor. And that’s a really difficult exercise, because my tendency as a visual animal is to sniff something and then imagine to myself what it would look like, but again with practice you can say to yourself, ‘that is more the smell than it is the sight of it, or at least as much the smell as the sight of it,’ so you become a more sensorially holistic mammal.”

These last comments remind me of twentieth century philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal article, What is it like to be a bat? in which he famously argues that we cannot escape our subjective perspective; the mind of a bat is tantalisingly alien to us. Foster is resigned to this limitation, but optimistic about what we can achieve in spite of our human-ness. “I was always Charles Foster the agonised Oxford don crawling around in a wood – I wasn’t a badger. But I was an agonised Oxford don crawling around in a wood who recognised to a greater extent than he recognised before that it’s a mere 30 million years since I shared a common ancestor with a badger, which is nothing. And that sort of kinship is not only possible, but vital.”