Star Trek

1 9 6 6 - 1 9 6 9 (USA)
79 x 50 minute episodes

The original Star Trek series was clever, engaging and now, campily classic. Having said that, the series almost did not get made.  The original pilot, The Cage, was dismissed by NBC as "too cerebral". An unprecedented second pilot was made and the series ultimately went ahead.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Gene Roddenberry intended Star Trek to be a space-age western with the action switched from the wild west to the final frontier of space.  The new "cowboys" of space were Captain James T Kirk (The "T" stood for Tiberius by the way) and the 438 officers and crew of the Constellation Class Starship USS Enterprise, from the United Federation of Planets.

Amongst the crew were: First Officer Spock (Half human, half Vulcan); Communications Officer Lt Uhura (Nichelle Nichols who had been a singer with Duke Ellington); Chief Engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott ; Ship's Doctor, Leonard "Bones" McCoy and Oriental helmsman Mr Sulu. In season two, Russian Ensign Mr Chekov was added after complaints from the USSR newspaper Pravda that the first nation in space was not represented aboard the Enterprise.

The Enterprise was propelled by a split infinitive (!) and weighed 190, 000 tons.  
It set forth on a five year mission to seek out new life forms, new civilizations and to generally "boldly go where no man had gone before". This was changed in the Eighties series Star Trek: The Next Generation series to be less sexist - another victim of the politically correct Gestapo.

To be fair, women did not fare well aboard the Enterprise. Lieutenant Uhura was little more than an intergalactic telephonist and other  female characters were usually just adornments for Captain Kirk. Most notorious of the "Indians" in this new space western were the Klingons and the Romulans. 

The special effects were cheap but ingenious for the time  - except perhaps the cast throwing themselves backwards and forwards across the bridge (not always in unison!) when the ship is under fire. The transporter effect of dissolving and re-assembling atoms was achieved by throwing aluminium dust into a beam of light. The phaser blasts were animated.

My personal favourite episode was the one in which the crew travelled to a parallel universe where everyone is just the same - only bad (or in Lt Uhura's case, gagging for it).  To indicate to the puzzled viewer that this was a parallel etc, the bad Spock had a beard. And Doctor McCoy just had a huge rotating dildo made of gold instead of a tricorder.