Up Till Now: The Autobiography

justice I always encountered a beautiful woman, from the prostitute with a heart of fifty-dollar bills, to my ex-wife, to a beach filled with bikini-clad girls, to the daughter of the victim, to the female cop who invited me to her place to “show him her calculator.” To gain more information either Heather had to take off some clothes or Adrian and I had to visit a place where women were taking off some clothes. There was always a lot of action, we tried to include three action sequences in each episode, and almost always ended with a chase scene. And we concluded with a humorous tag: the horse I picked by guessing number four beat the horse selected by his computer, my daughter wins the award for selling the most cookies—which I sold to all the people in the precinct who were going to show me how to sell cookies.
    I once asked a detective who’d seen the show if he thought it accurately reflected reality. He smiled and said, “You guys can cram more police work into an hour than I do in a year... Some days I go all day without a call.” Well, that wouldn’t make a very interesting show, Hooker and Romano sitting in their police car eating donuts. What do you want to do today, Vince? I don’t know, Hooker, what do you want to do? T.J. Hooker was an action show. There was atleast one chase scene in every episode, either I chased a bad guy on foot or in our car or both. On foot I’d somehow manage to keep pace with the bad guy. Even though I was wearing my uniform and carrying all my equipment, inevitably I’d have to jump over a chain-link fence or a brick wall or climb a ladder onto a roof, roll over the hood of a car, then make a leaping tackle, after which the perp and I would roll down a slope or near the edge of the roof, but almost always I caught him and cuffed him. And without losing my breath. In the car, it seemed like every time Adrian and I got a call to rush to a location where a crime was taking place we happened to be going in the opposite direction, because we always ended up doing a squealing U-turn in the middle of the block. Generally our criminals were terrible drivers; for special effects we drove cars off buildings, we drove them into lakes, we drove them through fires, and we crashed them, so clearly there was a budgetary reason our perps drove terribly beat-up cars. Every few shows we had a tremendous explosion; we blew up a lot of cars in five seasons, we blew up a yacht—once we even had a getaway car crash into a gasoline tanker to give us two great explosions. Unfortunately the special-effects people put a little too much gasoline in the tanker and it exploded in a cloud of flame that went right over the heads of the sound crew. Dangerous as can be—but it looked wonderful on film. After that the philosophy of the special-effects people became, why use only one gallon of gas when you can blow up ten!
    We probably had the highest body count on the network; at least one person got shot in every episode. People were constantly leaping between buildings and often falling off rooftops. On one show I put on a fireman’s coat and raced into a burning building to save two kids; on another episode I grabbed onto the strut of a small plane taking off and held on as I became airborne.
    I did many of my own stunts. I became extremely proficient with the SB24 side-handle nightstick. In fact, after watching me use it during one scene a crew member said, “Oh, now I understand why they refer to it as a billy club.” Okay, maybe they didn’t and I made that up. But it certainly could have happened. In more than thirtyyears my career had progressed from a sword to a stick. Actually, the movements were surprisingly similar. Both weapons were used to block blows, to attack, to fend off, and to bring down the enemy. A police instructor worked with me to get it right. I could twirl that stick and oww! Those memories hurt. Obviously I had to learn how to use it and as every officer knows you bang yourself up pretty good learning the correct way to use it.
    In doing the show I gained tremendous admiration for police officers. In most cases it’s a difficult and thankless job. It is the thin blue line that keeps civilization from falling apart. That’s why a bad cop is such a detriment not only to the police force, but to democracy. People working in law enforcement really liked this show. At times they would try to explain to me what the job was all about, what it meant to them, how tough it