Private Letters

"Dear Bill Shatner

Well, this was the weekend I had been planning all year with fingers crossed and breath bated, hoping to fly down to Madrid, having “won” an auction for one of the golden tickets to dine with you last Saturday night.

Sadly, it seems like the organisers were pretty clueless so I have found myself with a few days off so I thought I'd write you a letter. Oh God, a bloody fan letter! (Sorry, you don't have to read it!)

I had the opportunity to be in the same room as you once before – in the Royal Albert Hall in 1996. I remember you being asked a question that went something like this.... ‘In Star Trek 5 what did you mean when you said “I need my pain”?’

Sitting in the audience, I felt as though I knew the answer to this question, but still my skin cringed and my nerves jangled for you (or was it the other way around?). What an unfairly complex question to be asked to articulate an answer to ... cold, as it were! But what flowed from your mouth in the next ten minutes has stayed with me. I can't remember a word of it! But it was the perfect mix of poetic philosophy and life lessons. It seemed to touch on every sweeping human concept from Sartre to well, I don't know, some more recent seer that neither of us has ever heard of.

I am older now. I suppose within your craft this would be called improvisational skill. And in truth, I think you knew the answer so well because you had spent time thinking about it, probably in preparation for the line to be delivered on film. But although, I don't talk often of gifts, expressing the poetic grace of life in a way that touches an auditorium of strangers is the finest of skills.

So I am really writing to thank you for your contribution to my life with your many varied performances and to say how much I admire your work rate, your risk-taking and your sense of humour. To me these are the things that define you the most, and I find each of them inspirational.

A few weeks ago, I download an episode of Rookie Blue. I had never heard of this TV series but the listings magazine pointed it out because... well, you were guest-starring.  Your performance blew me away. I wasn't surprised but you elevated what looked like a fairly mediocre TV programme by transmitting a depth of feeling in such a short window of time. In watching this, your performance so quickly connected and affected. Except it is not watching any more is it? In elevating the artform, you make us partake.

I think I feel the emotion more as I get older. I think you do. Our life experiences dig big holes in us. Is it not the challenge is to fill these holes with ever deeper quantities of happiness? Or if happiness is too ethereal a concept, then at least to fill them with challenge and newness. That'll do nicely.

As a boy I bought an early autobiography of yours called Shatner: Where No Man. I still haven't read it (I am a shamefully poor reader) but I still have it. On the back was a quote, purportedly from you, which said “Anything done supremely well is an act of sex”. A little cheeky, I thought at the time (and frankly I'm still not sure about it). But what I can say, if you'll forgive the overfamiliar term of address, is thank you very much for having sex with us all, Bill.

Admittedly it is sex without dinner! But I hope you will continue to silver service us for many years to come."