And since the first two have already made William Shatner incredibly rich, it’s time for him to turn his attention onto the third – which explains why tonight sees the American premiere of Shatner’s Raw Nerve, a show where William Shatner will interview celebrities by utilising the unique crackpot, paranoid, ego-fuelled, screeching, insecure ranting that appears to have alienated him from everyone he’s ever met. So that’ll be fun.

Incidentally, if you don’t happen to live in America, or do live in America but don’t subscribe to the Bio Channel, you can get a taste of what Shatner’s Raw Nerve will be like by going into a pub on a weekday morning, poking an elderly habitual alcoholic with a stick and whispering the word ‘immigrants’ again and again until his face goes purple and he dies. Just a little heads-up, there.

William Shatner has been around for so long that you can neatly divide his career into handy little segments. Like the Star Trek segment, for instance. Or the post-Star Trek segment where he let the adulation go to his head until none of his former co-stars could stand to be around him. Or the segment where he started deliberately taking himself less seriously because he worked out that everyone thought he was a turd.

Or this new segment, where William Shatner has decided that he’s too old to pretend he’s not a turd any more and is quite happy to be a turd about whatever he likes all the time.

We’ve seen hints of Shatner’s resurgent turdiness recently – like when he threw a hissy fit because he couldn’t be in the new Star Trek movie, or when he launched into a confusing paranoid diatribe about not being invited to George Takei’s wedding – but now it’s time for William Shatner to rubberstamp this turdy segment into the history books.

And he’s decided to do this with Shatner’s Raw Nerve, a new show that starts tonight which seems to revolve around the notion that William Shatner will behave like a turd in front of other celebrities widely regarded to be turds of equal or greater value until they throw a turdy strop and reveal secrets about their lives. And, yes, we do wish we were making this up. Reuters reports:

In “Shatner’s Raw Nerve”, he will interview the likes of actors Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer and Leonard Nimoy. Shatner said the weekly show allows him to discover an inner truth about each guest. As for his own raw nerves, the 77-year-old Shatner listed things that get under his skin. “We all have many, but choose a subject — onions, snakes, loneliness, fear of death.”

It might be easy to mock Shatner’s Raw Nerve for its bewildering premise, but really we should be praising William Shatner for making it – after all, by letting Jon Voight back on TV the show techincally qualifies as a charity.

And if it’s a success, who knows what will come after Shatner’s Raw Nerve – after all, Shatner’s Raw Nerve is already a follow-up to the wildly successful Shatner’s Inflamed Kidney, so here’s hoping that in the years to come we’ll get to see Shatner’s Dislocated Thumb, Shatner’s Obvious Wig or even, if we’re really lucky, Shatner’s Great Big Stupid Angry Fat Arse.

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