In the last blog, I wrote about Thomas More’s Utopia and the more gen­er­al area of utopi­an fic­tion and it occurs to me that this week’s top­ic, Gene Roddenberry’s sem­i­nal TV series Star Trek, itself falls square­ly into the genre of utopi­an fic­tion, albeit a far future one in which human­i­ty, hav­ing con­quered the stars, has also con­quered those quaint old divi­sions that char­ac­terised 1960s Amer­i­ca. The Enterprise’s crew of star sailors includes a Russ­ian, a Japan­ese and a black woman and no-one bats an eye­lid because it’s the 23rd cen­tu­ry and the Cold War, Hiroshi­ma, and racial seg­re­ga­tion are all mark­ers of a dis­tant past.

Star Trek first debuted in the US on 8^th Sep­tem­ber 1966 but here in the UK it wasn’t until 12^th July 1969 (just eight days before the Apol­lo 11 mis­sion to the moon) that this soon-to-be-huge pop-cul­ture phe­nom­e­non began air­ing on BBC One. It must have been a few years lat­er when it came upon my radar because I have no mem­o­ry of a black-and-white ver­sion and it wasn’t until about 1974 that we got a colour tel­ly. But boy, how they cap­i­talised on that new colour medi­um: bright gold, blue and red tunics abound­ed aboard the USS Enter­prise, whilst the numer­ous plan­ets they beamed down to, and aliens they encoun­tered, were also cap­tured in glo­ri­ous tech­ni­colour.

The con­cepts were mind-blow­ing­ly imag­i­na­tive, the sound effects reas­sur­ing­ly futur­is­tic (the back­ground com­put­er chat­ter on the bridge, the sound of a com­mu­ni­ca­tor flip­ping open, the swoosh of the auto­mat­ic doors, the fir­ing pf phasers, the mech­a­nisms of the trans­porter in full beam), and the sets were…well, lim­it­ed by the peri­od shall we say, but full marks for imag­i­na­tion.

The Enter­prise, as every­one knows, was a space explo­ration star­ship on a mis­sion to “explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civil­i­sa­tions; to bold­ly go where no man has gone before”. Led by the Cap­tain James T Kirk, First Offi­cer Spock and Chief Med­ical Offi­cer Leonard “Bones” McCoy, the crew also includ­ed lieu­tenants Sulu and Uhu­ra, ensign Chekov and of course, on the engi­neer­ing deck and respon­si­ble for all things engi­neer­ing (includ­ing beam­ing, shields, di-lithi­um crys­tals, and giv­ing her as much as he dare), was Mont­gomery “Scot­ty” Scott.

It spawned an immense­ly suc­cess­ful fran­chise, of course, with some­thing like eleven spin-off TV series and numer­ous fea­ture films, but it’s the orig­i­nal series that will always be the true Star Trek to me. Their week­ly mis­sions had me rapt from the moment Kirk kicked off each episode with an excerpt from his Captain’s Log, and below, for the sake of nos­tal­gia, are the open­ing and clos­ing cred­its of this icon­ic TV series.