Luxurious chest hair and little red trunks versus doughnuts and “D’oh!”. In the battle of the US television heavyweights, The Hoff has vanquished Homer.

Or at least in Venezuela, where The Simpsons has been ordered from television schedules by President Hugo Chavez after being deemed unsuitable for children. Controversial enough, but in an even more curious move its 11am timeslot has been handed to Baywatch, the show that launched a thousand adolescent dreams.

David Hasselhoff and his aerodynamic life-saving cohorts began their slow-motion jog across the nation’s screens on Friday morning, after a ruling that The Simpsons was in danger of breaching the Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television.

The National Telecommunications Commission said the show pushed “messages that go against the whole education of boys, girls and adolescents”. So far the regulatory agency, which reports to the government, has failed to explain why the cartoon family from Springfield poses more of a threat to the minds of Venezuelan children than a lifeguard falling out of her swimsuit.

“It had to be taken off,” said Elba Guillen, a spokeswoman for Televen TV station (referring to The Simpsons). “The government considers it to be a series that isn’t appropriate for that time because it isn’t appropriate for children.”

The channel insists it received no complaints about the show, which has been portraying the lives of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie since 1989.

Perez Nahim, the manager of Televen, said: “We are hoping it will continue to have a good rating, because The Simpsons worked very well - so much so that it had the highest levels of viewership for that morning timetable in the history of the channel."

The Simpsons notched up its 19th series this year, and there have been more episodes of the Matt Groening show than any other animated series in American history. But Baywatch, the programme that launched Pamela Anderson, has an impressive global pedigree of its own. The Guinness Book of Records claims it is the most watched TV series in the world, with over 1.1 billion viewers

The show was rebranded as Baywatch Hawaii for its 11th and 12th series after Mitch Buchannan, played by Hasselhoff, moved to the Pacific Island.

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