Trek star

Terry Shuttleworth is not a rock idol. He is not a movie star, a pop pin-up or a famous footballer and yet millions of people around the world would love to be in his shoes. Terry Shuttleworth, you see, is paid to know all there is to know about Star Trek, from the original series to the Next Generation, from Deep Space Nine to Enterprise.

Terry wasn’t always a Trekkie however, and didn’t really get into the show until he began working for Paramount Home Video in 1993. “I started watching it just to get to know the product and before I knew it, I was watching three or four episodes a night because I had a few years to catch up on,” he smiles.

Describing himself as a “Star Trek evangelist”, Terry immersed himself in every aspect of the series and the movies over the following years, and is keen to pass his love of all things space-based onto the public at large.

“Star Trek has got this reputation for being somewhat strange and elitist but there are a couple of million people who watch it every time it comes on the TV and look at the amount of people who go to the Star Trek movies,” he enthuses. “It is not for a strange section of society. It is just a case of spending some time with Star Trek and getting to know it.”

Terry stopped working for Paramount as an employee in 1995 but the company still keeps him on the payroll as a consultant “because whenever they want to know anything, they phone me up”, he laughs.

While he has regularly given talks at conventions in the past, these days he tends not to go to too many Star Trek events, although he still puts in an appearance at some of the bigger gatherings, such as Fed-Con. “Although people know what is happening in the Star Trek universe, they also want to know what is happening on the business side,” he reveals.

Despite being an all-round expert on everything from Captain Kirk’s underpants to the Klingons’ dental hygiene, Terry still finds himself out-Trekkied from time to time. “What you find is that people have their own areas of interest and will know everything there is to know about that specific area,” he grins, “whereas I tend to know a lot about everything.”

He has been on the bridges of most of the spacecraft used in the various series, from the Starship Enterprise to Voyager, and his eyes gleam with exhilaration when he recalls what it was like to stand at the helm of these fantasy ships: “even the most cynical person cannot fail to be dragged along with the excitement”.

Terry’s latest pet project is the release of Enterprise on video. Starring Scott Bakula (Quantum Leap), Enterprise is set 113 years before the original Star Trek of Kirk, Spock et al, and chronicles mankind’s first forays into the final frontier, complete with dodgy warp drives and the crew’s fear of transformers. Terry is also highly animated about Jean Luc Picard making his DVD debut, as the first series of Star Trek: Next Generation got its first digital release on April 1st.

“There are seven discs in each season, which contain all 26 episodes, and the seventh disc in the set is full of extras that have never been seen before,” Terry enthuses. By the end of this year, the entire series of Next Generation will be available on DVD, complete with enhanced picture quality and Dolby surround sound.

Shuttleworth admits that he is a big sci-fi fan across the board, and even admits to being a lover of, dare I say it, Star Wars, long considered the enemy of the true Trekkie.

“Bringing people into the science fiction universe is good for everybody,” he muses. “If people are into Star Trek, chances are they will be interested in something like Babylon 5 and vice versa, which is great. And I think Star Wars did a lot for science fiction. I was nine when Star Wars came out and I just loved it. That’s what spun me into this universe.”