Captain's log: Leonard Nimoy, left, as Dr Spock and William Shatner, right, as Captain Kirk in the original TV series

To its detractors, Star Trek represents everything that's wrong with science fiction. A corny space soap opera with wonky sets and often wonkier acting.



Improbable technologies and implausible plots, held together with shaky gimmicks such as time travel, faster-than-light warp drives, bad jokes and teleport machines.

The story of Captain James Tiberius Kirk and his beloved starship, the U.S.S. Enterprise, boldly going forth on a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, is often derided, its fans dismissed as sad obsessives in need of a life.

But this impression is utterly wrong and those who dismiss Star Trek out of hand are usually people who haven't seen it.

In fact Star Trek - the original TV series first ran an extraordinary 43 years ago - was groundbreaking television, at its best a complex morality tale which broke numerous conventions and which was not afraid to tackle subjects contemporary drama shied away from.

When I first started watching Star Trek, in the early Seventies, its dark and adult themes went right over my head, but the gadgets and spooky aliens had me spellbound.



It is testament to the quality of the scripts that, like so many of my generation, I could carry on watching the programmes as an adult and still find them entertaining.

The 'rightness' of the original idea, conceived in 1960 by Gene Roddenberry, is proven by the fact that Star Trek has turned out to be one of the most enduring franchises in television and movie history.

The original series (which was not a hit at first) begat numerous spin-offs and feature-length films. Some of these have been successful (notably the Next Generation series starring Patrick Stewart) and some less so (the odd-numbered movies were usually derided).

Now a new Star Trek film takes the idea back to the beginning, with a young Kirk gathering his crew and setting forth for the first time.



It has already garnered glowing reviews and is widely predicted to be one of the biggest hits of 2009. The question is, why, after almost half a century, is Star Trek still capable of inspiring so many?





The secret of Star Trek, as with all good science fiction, is that the 'science' and, especially, the technology form a backdrop to the real business in hand - plot and characterisation.

The original series provided stories of adventure, suspense and excitement running parallel with a series of morality tales.

Star Trek had (unusually for sci-fi) well-realised characters, from the hot-headed all-American super-hero Captain James T Kirk to the often angst-ridden Vulcan-human hybrid Mr Spock, whose psyche comprised a battleground between his impulsive, human 'emotional' side and his cold, logical Vulcan inheritance.



We had a gruff engineer, Scotty, and 'Bones' McCoy, an irascible medic whose loyalty to his friends often held the whole thing together.



Three-piece: From left, Leonard Nimoy as Dr Spock, William Shatner as Captain Kirk and James Doohan as Scotty show off their phaser guns Fringe benefits: Dr Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, in the original TV series of Star Trek on the bridge of the Enterprise

Conceived at the height of the Cold War, Star Trek was set in a utopian future, the world of the 2200s when Earth's petty national rivalries had been put aside for ever, the world united for the first time.

Although the world of Star Trek was robustly 'American' in most respects, the bridge of the Enterprise was unusually multi-ethnic, with a Russian navigator (Chekov), an Oriental navigator (Sulu), an African woman (Uhura) as communications officer, that British engineer and, of course, a half-alien (Spock).

In the captain's seat: The Ponder The Mystery singer - best known as Captain James T. Kirk - will also direct and host a TV documentary about Star Trek: The Next Generation

It is perhaps hard now to understand just how groundbreaking this was.

In 1966, when the series was first aired on American TV, race segregation laws were still on the statute books of 12 American states and non-white characters were rare or non-existent in TV drama.

Aboard the U.S.S Enterprise, it was very rarely remarked upon that Uhura was black, and that was remarkable in itself.



Beam us up: Scene from the 70s TV series starring DeForest Kelley as 'Bones' McCoy and William Shatner as Captain Kirk

Even more remarkable was the fact that in a 1968 episode entitled Plato's Stepchildren, she was kissed by her white captain, one of the first interracial kisses seen on American television and the source of some controversy in the Southern States.

Few of the Star Trek stories have dated. The idea of a benevolent superpower, the United Federation of Planets, spreading peace and democracy through the Galaxy has strong resonances today.

The 'prime directive' of Starfleet was that Kirk and his crew were not supposed to interfere in the lives of the aliens they encountered, even when those lives were blighted by war or dictatorship.



BUT this was a directive they usually ignored, often using overwhelming force if necessary. The ethos of the Star Trek universe was deeply liberal - but it was liberal with a very hard edge.







As well as race, Star Trek was not afraid to tackle sexual politics. Kirk, unmarried, was depicted as a womaniser, but he had an obvious respect for women unusual among fictional alpha-males.

And politics itself reared its ugly head many times. In The City On The Edge Of Forever, Kirk and his landing party are time-transported to Thirties New York, where they threaten to alter history by preventing the death of a woman called Edith Keeler (played by Joan Collins, no less).

Edith does indeed die, but if she hadn't it is revealed that she would have led a pacifist movement that prevented the entry of the U.S. into the Second World War, hence ensuring a Nazi victory.

Some have interpreted this as a dig against the anti-war movement raging at the time in response to Vietnam. Or it could be seen as making the clever philosophical point that sometimes evil will result from the very best of intentions. Either way, this is not mindless space opera.

One theme not explored in the original series was homosexuality, although the general air of campness and philosophy of celebrating diversity (and the sometimes ambiguous relationship between Spock and Kirk) has won Star Trek many gay fans.

Star Trek was, at times, absurd. The sets rarely passed muster and some of the 'science' was risible. And yet, at its best, it managed to combine the essence of the best Wild Western romances, Greek myth and legend, and classical literature.

Sure, there were ray guns and time machines, 'aliens' who were nothing more than wobbly lights (even cheaper than a man in a monster suit) and planets apparently made of polystyrene.