Star Trek finally arrived on British television screens at 5:15pm on Saturday, 12 July 1969, five weeks after its final episode aired in the US, and I was lucky enough to catch the premiere episode, ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’. To quote from that week’s Radio Times, which appropriately featured a cover publicising the imminent Apollo 11 lunar mission: “Today the moon – tomorrow the cosmos? The first is fact, the second is so far fiction. Nevertheless this new adventure series looks forward to a not-too-distant future when man will be exploring and colonising the worlds beyond us.”
Radio Times,Stardate 12-07-69
Oddly enough, a weekly comic strip loosely based upon the show had already been running in the pages of Joe 90 for several months, and survived that title’s incorporation into TV21, but it was clear the initial stories were produced with only a very limited knowledge of the source material (“Captain Kurt”?).
Anyway, I was hooked from that very first viewing, and still consider myself a Trekkie, although I have absolutely no interest in the faux fanfic peddled by serial plagiarists JJ Abrams and Alex Kurtzman (a disappointingly similar situation to that of my other long-time televisual love, Doctor Who).