Terry Shuttleworth, arguably the world's biggest authority on Star Trek, gives Brian Boyd a Klingon lesson.
He's not a trekkie, he's a trekker. The former implies sticking on a pair of pointy ears and running around with an imitation phaser gun; the latter implies that one is a serious student of a popular culture phenomenon. "Yes, trekker is the correct phrase," says Terry Shuttleworth, a leading consultant - and arguably the world's biggest authority - on all things Star Trek. He's the sort of person who could tell you the exact scientific properties of dilithium crystals and that Pollux V is a planet in the Beta Geminorium visited by the Enterprise on Stardate 3468. He also speaks fluent Klingon.
Shuttleworth (a mild-mannered Englishman) knew very little about Star Trek when he began working for Paramount Home Video in 1993, but as the company brought out the Star Trek videos, he thought he better watch an episode or two. "I began to watch it just to get to know the product" he says, "but before I knew it, I was watching three or four episodes a night. There was a whole lot to catch up on as the series stretches back to the 1960s, so I found myself getting hooked".
He became such an authority on the programme that even though he has now left Paramount, they employ him as a consultant: "Whenever they want to know anything, they ask me. I'm seen as this big Star Trek resource"
He's been involved in the launch plans for beaming the programme down into fresh territories such as Korea and Mexico and has, over the years, been rewarded for his encyclopedic knowledge by getting to stand on the bridges of most of the spacecraft used in the programme.
Whether it's the "classic" series (the one with Captain Kirk), Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise or the big-screen spin-offs, Star Trek still holds an unlikely grip on TV and cinema viewers worldwide. Although set in centuries to come, it deals with contemporary issues. When it first aired in 1966, its mini-morality plays were being beamed out to a cold war/nuclear threat world. The programme's originator, Gene Rodenberry was a classic 1960s liberal and the stardeck of the Enterprise was always balanced along gender and race lines - not at all a reflection of life in 1960s US. Rodenberry directed the first inter-racial kiss on television - between Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura.
Shuttleworth has been to the conventions, to talk about the show, and has a rather bemused attitude to convention-goers who turn up in nylon tops and pointy ears. Is there anything about the show you don't know? "I tend to know a lot about everything," he says, "and occasionally I'll come up against people who have a specialised area of interest - like the Klingons - and they will know everything there is to know about that specific area."
Speaking of which, is it true you're fluent in Klingon? "I can speak it, yes, whether or not I'm fluent in it I don't know. You can now do a degree in Klingon in a US university and there's also all these teach-yourself Klingon books. I learn it by using audio tapes, I'd have them on in the car."
After much prodding, he speaks a bit of Klingon - which sounds like the Czech language spoken backwards at the bottom of a big well. That's very strange.
"Not really, it's all been formalised now, there's a vocabulary and a grammar to it. The original actors just made it up as they went along, but now it's a formalised language." Do you speak Klingon with other people? "Yes. You know that Hamlet has been translated into Klingon?"
The first series of Next Generation is on DVD and the first series of Enterprise is now available on VHS.