When Captain James T Kirk strides into the room, there is no whooshing sound from the doors, nor a red-shirted crewman handing him a data pad.

Instead, William Shatner has quietly arrived for this interview from his Gallagher Estate hotel room sans entourage. Even his US agent is nowhere to be seen.

He has only had a single night’s rest since flying from the US to appear at the second annual Comic Con Africa in Midrand. On day one, he was already on stage sharing stories and memories, answering questions with razor-sharp wit and striding to and fro, very much unlike an 88-year-old star who had just spent long hours on a transatlantic flight.

Yet he now admits: “I was blind with fatigue. I hadn’t slept in two days. It’s going to be a real adventure to see if I can stay awake.”

Fatigue or not, after one fan’s tongue-in-cheek question, “Whatever happened to the kid who got stuck in the escalator in Rescue 911? Was he OK?”, Shatner fired right back: “No, he died, he was ground up! Too bad [you didn’t see it], you would have loved it!”

For many at Comic Con Africa, Shatner will always be the dashing commander of the USS Enterprise whose space-faring adventures only warped into SA at the start of the Eighties, after the advent of TV locally in 1976. Star Trek had debuted in the US in 1966, though its popularity only truly grew through broadcast syndication in the Seventies.

In SA, the Eighties were the decade of Shatner. Soon after Star Trek aired here, he was back as the tough titular cop in TJ Hooker.

“And you thought, how rapidly that man has aged!” he laughs when told about SA being so late to the TV party.