Ainsley's Adventures: Hawaiian Venus: Tia Carrere

Agent DVD enjoys a trashy TV series, particularly if it features attractive women in skimpy clothing, so he was delighted to be able to pick up all three series of nineties Tomb Raider clone Relic Hunter in HMV sale in Toronto at the weekend.

Relic Hunter cast: Christien Anholt, Tia Carrere and Lindy Booth

A totally shamelss rip-off of the Tomb Raider computer game (it actually pre-dates the films with Angelina Jolie), with a lot of Indiana Jones thrown in too, it ran from 1999 until 2002. Each episode features some relic (not necessarily an ancient one) and starts with a scene setting (and incredibly cheap looking) flashback. We then cut to Tia Carrere as one of the least convincing professors in TV and film history (well, alright, Denise Richards was worse in The World is not Enough (1999)) in her office at American University, Trinity College (in reality the exteriors were all filmed at the University of Toronto) who then has to travel somehwere exotic to find said relic at the request of a museum, CIA, secret organisation etc, etc. Oddly Tia always wore glasses when she was in professor mode but not out in the field. Anyway, just the sort of utter mindless nonsense that Triple P enjoys after a day of trying to sort out confused foreign governments.

Talking of which, the key thing about Relic Hunter is that it is not a Hollywood series. It isn't even a Hollywood series filmed in Canada, It was actually a Canadian/UK co-production. Later there was a tie-up with French TV company Gaumont which led to some later episodes being filmed in France and Italy which made it look a bit more expensive than it was.

Gratuitous Tia rear-end in mud shot

Tia Carrere plays Prof Sydney Fox (honestly!) and has a clueless British sidekick played by Christien Anholt (son of Howard's Way slimeball Tony) playing Hugh Grant. There is also a ditzy blonde secretary. But all this and its dodgy history (sorry, Cuzco was an Inca city not an Aztec city) are irrelevant compared with the real point of the show which was to show Tia Carrere; flashing her (not that impressive) cleavage, in her lingerie, wearing tight shorts, in wet clothes and, our favourite, in tight vests, as often as possible. In fact, the main fun of the show was spotting each gratuitous Tia shot (we're sure you could turn it into a drinking game) in every episode.

Hawaiian born Tia once said that she wasn't very keen on taking her clothes off for the camera but fortunately had a change of heart for Playboy in January 2001. Good for her; it wasn't like the recent Kelly Brook pictorial, and so typical of Playboy's celebrity pictorials, where the celebrity doesn't flash more than her bust.

Tia (real name Althea Rae Duhinio Janairo), who is now 43, was born in Honolulu and, apart from acting, has also made a number of albums in which she sings in Hawaiian. One of them, Ikena, actually won a Grammy award in 2009.

Whilst Tia is a lovely girl she doesn't always photograph well and can sometimes look a bit cross-eyed. However, Playboy got the best of her and she looks like a classic South Seas beauty in these pictures.

She would certainly fit nicely into Agent Triple P's South Seas scenario and would be just what he would want to find under the mosquito net after a long flying boat journey from San Francisco.