Television - Captain Kirk parodies himself in a tribute to a seminal series, writes Andrew Billen How William Shatner Changed the World (Channel 5)

When we stare up at the stars, we see them not as they are, but as they were many years ago. Similarly, or so this exhaustive and somewhat exhausting two-hour documentary seemed to argue, it has taken us 40 years - yes, 40 - to get a clear vision of Star Trek. Mind you, there was always a time lag between Star Trek's transmission and appreciation. The five-year mission of the original series "to explore strange new worlds" was cancelled after just three years in 1969, and the show achieved true popularity only through reruns in the 1970s. Eventually so much merchandise was sold that in 1979 Paramount released Star Trek: the motion picture, the first of several lucrative films, and in 1987, for television, Star Trek: the next generation. The TV franchise ended only last year with the final episode of Star Trek: enterprise.

As William Shatner, who played Kirk, the original captain, explained to Jonathan Ross on his chat show last Friday, this documentary (24 May) should by rights have been called "How Star Trek Changed the World", but Paramount refused permission. Shatner has, in his seventies, re-invented himself as a figure of thoroughgoing self-parody, and may be best known to younger readers not as the scourge of the Klingons but, through his All-Bran commercials (and a possible pun on his name), as the enemy of constipation. He was, he scolded the camera in the open- ing sequence of the doc, too busy for this Trekky nostalgia. He had a lunch with Spielberg to get to, dinner with Katzenberg and "breakfast with a few other bergs" (this is a man who last year released an album called Has Been).

The conceit of his narration was that he believed he had been roped in to emcee a particularly bad documentary for nerds, which discerning viewers would come to realise was actually a rather good one. Thus the cornier his jokes and the worse his links, the more Star Trek shone in comparison. Or something like that.

Man was already in space by the time Star Trek was launched but, it turns out, Nasa's future scientists were at least as inspired by the Enterprise's warp speed as by the Eagle's ponderous descent to the lunar surface. We witnessed Marc Rayman, Nasa's chief propulsion engineer, answer his Enterprise-shaped phone and weaken at the knees as he heard Shatner's voice. Responsible for sending the current Voyager (a name pre-owned by a third of the Star Trek TV progeny) to the wrong side of Jupiter, his inspiration for iron propulsion had been a plot point in an ancient Star Trek. Similarly, the retrieval of lumps of grey rock from the moon was not exciting enough for the young Seth Shostak, who wanted aliens in his outer space and now sweeps the skies with radio telescopes at Seti, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence centre. The astronaut Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space, was filled with dreams by Lt Uhura and in her 1992 space shuttle mission addressed Houston with the gambit: "All hailing frequencies are open" (which will mean something to some of you).

But the more impressive links between the future sketched by Star Trek and the future we have turned out to live in are to be found not in outer space but in our homes and offices. Rob Haitani, product designer of the Palm One, explained it is de rigueur to be a Star Trek fan if you work in Silicon Valley. Martin Cooper, Motorola's former chief engineer, insis-ted that his prototype mobile phone, although as heavy as a brick, was inspired as much by Kirk's communicator as his insight that "people are inherently mo-bile". One of the first home computers was named Astare after a Star Trek planet; more significantly, the Enterprise was cluttered with small desktop or hand- held computers at a time when Arthur C Clarke was predicting that in 2001 they would be big enough to float inside. Even the body scanners that diagnose our tumours today look remarkably like those used by Bones McCoy in the starship's sick bay. As Cooper said of Star Trek: "To us it was not a fantasy: it was an objective."

Shatner made a few nods in the direc- tion of the visionary genius of the late Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek's inventor, although, as I discovered when I interviewed him for the Times this month, he had no particular fondness for him. Much of the "vision" was born out of necessity. It was because the model of the shuttle craft was late, for example, that writers came up with the money-saving option of the Transporter Room to get Kirk to a planet. Yet Roddenberry's insistence on a multi-ethnic and, indeed, multi-species crew was courageous. As a metaphor for a planet that might not only survive but prosper if its inhabitants worked together, Star Trek's poop deck was not such a bad one. James T Kirk's initials were not so far from JFK's.

Shatner is no fool, though these days he often plays the part. My favourite analysis of Star Trek's success was one he gave in an interview to a fan years ago. Nobody, he complained, ever talked about the programme's joie de vivre, "the tap dancing". This documentary's humour could, like Shatner today, be a little heavy on its feet, but it at least tried to honour its subject's joie de vivre.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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