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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But despite their 40-year professional obligations to each other, George Takei and William Shatner are still happy to take chunks out of each other in public. Like yesterday, for instance, when William Shatner went on the internet to endlessly bitch about how psychotic George Takei was for not inviting him to his wedding.

At the time, George Takei told everyone that actually he had invited William Shatner to his wedding but, just in case anyone missed it, he’s decided to reassert his claim – while throwing in some new jabs about Shatner’s stability for good measure. On television. Honestly, this is just like that movie Grumpy Old Men, only worse because neither of them are dead yet.

Just a quick heads up, everyone – it looks like we might be heading into a new Phase Of Shatner. The old phases of Shatner were pretty good – like the one where William Shatner’s ego heavily outweighed his hammy talents, and the one where he countered all the ridicule he gained from the first phase by pretending to be in on the joke – but this one looks like it might be a doozy.

That’s because in the Third Phase Of Shatner, William Shatner has let the ego back in and he’s old enough not to care. We first saw flashes of this when William Shatner didn’t get a role in the new Star Trek movie and went slightly berserk about it, but this stuff about George Takei’s wedding invite seems to have pushed Shatner over the edge.

For the uninitiated, George Takei gay-married his partner last month, and William Shatner didn’t turn up. And in a completely confusing internet video this week, William Shatner claimed that he wasn’t invited to the wedding because George Takei suffered from ‘psychosis’.

In the wake of this, George Takei had already issued a counter-statement claiming that he did invite William Shatner to the wedding, but that didn’t really hit the mark, so instead he went on TV and repeated it. The LA Times quotes:

“It is absolutely baffling to us because, in fact, we did invite Bill and we didn’t hear from him… I think his stability is quite questionable. … Bill likes to be the star of the show. He likes the attention that is focused on him. It’s a big, shiny, demanding ego. … It’s all typical of Bill. … [His] ranting and raving is just silliness.”

What happens now is anyone’s guess. Technically it should be William Shatner’s turn to lay into George Takei again, but we get the feeling that if he got angrier about it all he’d end up squirting jets of burning blood out of his bumhole, so maybe that option is out.

In a way it’s upsetting that two old men like William Shatner and George Takei have resorted to slagging each other off in such a humiliatingly public way. But really we’re just upset that this fall-out didn’t happen back in the mid-1980s – because then we’re pretty sure that the bloody awful Star Trek film about those poxy whales wouldn’t have ever been sodding made.

The first outcome involves him trying to convince the big, white cake he really is a lawyer – and that he absolutely understands all the legal jargon and everything – for the complete duration of your first dance. The second possible outcome involves him crashing a life-size mock-up of the Starship Enterprise through the beautiful gazebo your grandfather lovingly finished building for you the day before his last heart attack.

We heard that last one he actually did to Leonard Nemoy. Seriously – there were tractor beam parts all over the roof, gutters, guest cars and lawn. This is why, we assume, Bill Shatner was not invited to Helmsman Sulu’s big gay history-book wedding. Shatner doesn’t understand this though, and he seems kinda pissed about his lack of an invite.

Off the top of our heads we can think of three things Ringo Starr and William Shatner have in common. The first two have to do mostly with penile stripes and a shared love for cookies. The third one though, well the third one is the only one you really need to know about – they both seem to dislike people in whatever forms they may be encountered in.

Ringo, for instance, has the grump with his fans. He maybe even wishes they’d all throw themselves over the trembling ledge of a train station, if you catch our meaning. Shatner likes his fans enough, apparently, but only if he’s never worked with any of them ever in his whole life. This includes the shop keep who hired a young Billy Shatner to restock his scarce food shelves during the height of the great depression.

Imagine the darkness of heart that could dislike someone who helped feed your family during such a tumultuous time. Unthinkable!

Untrue too!

Shatner does think his old coworker George Takei has a beef with him though. According to Bill, Takei refused to allow Shatner within 100 yards of anyplace he ever planned to marry, and even tried to get him deported for the entire duration of the honeymoon. That or the captain was just pissed for not getting an invite. Whatever. Here’s a Kirk-quote:

“The whole thing makes me feel badly. Poor man. There is such a sickness there. It’s so patently obvious that there is a psychosis there. I don’t know what his original thing about me was. I have no idea.”

We peeled that quote out of a video Shatner posted on his own website. The whole thing doesn’t end with Shatner’s hurt feelings though – Takei has a retort:

“It is unfortunate that Bill was unable to join us for our wedding as he indeed was invited to attend. It is our hope that at this point he joins us in voting no on Proposition 8, which seeks to [absorb all of Texas into California, and then turn the whole thing into a giant movie studio with tremendous tax breaks.]“

We lost the last part of the quote there, but we know Hollywood types, and feel pretty secure in our assumption of how that stupid speech probably ended. We also feel secure in our knowledge of geography.

Now get down there and watch Shatner’s weird rant:

And that's because William Shatner won't be in the new Star Trek movie. Although he was rumoured to have a cameo in the movie alongside Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner has revealed that meetings with the new Star Trek director JJ Abrams were unsuccessful and the movie will go ahead sans Shatner. And now William Shatner can't stop bitching about the Star Trek snub. But can you blame him? After all, we'd be bitter if our derided egomaniacal role in a TV show that hasn't been made for almost 40 years wasn't reprised in a movie that's set several years before the TV show we starred in 40 years ago, too. Or something. Oh look, we've confused ourselves now.

If everything goes to plan, the new Star Trek movie will start shooting this week. And a lot of people are finding it very exciting, mainly thanks to the involvement of JJ Abrams – the man behind Lost and the person you need to blame when you realise that all the Klingons in the new movie have been replaced with polar bears and angry wafts of smoke. JJ Abrams has put an interesting cast together for his new Star Trek movie – the baddie from Heroes will be Spock and an unknown actor will be Captain Kirk and Eric Bana will be the villain, which all sounds good, but Scotty will be played by Simon Pegg and Sulu by John Cho from Harold And Kumar Get The Munchies, which makes us worry that JJ Abrams wants to turn Star Trek into some kind of red-font stoner comedy.

But one person who won't get to be in the new Star Trek is William Shatner, a man who has possibly given more to Star Trek than anyone else over the years. He was in the Star Trek TV series, the Star Trek animated series, seven Star Trek films (included one he directed), four Star Trek videogames and has written nine Star Trek books. William Shatner is so dedicated to Star Trek that he's even able to piss out dilithium crystals at will. But meetings with JJ Abrams haven't gone well and the rumoured Star Trek cameo from William Shatner isn't going to happen any more, as the Associated Press reports:

The original Capt. Kirk is disheartened he won't get to boldly go anywhere with his old pal Spock in the new "Star Trek" movie. While Leonard Nimoy is reprising his role as the pointy-eared Vulcan in next year's science-fiction flick, William Shatner is not on board as Kirk. "I couldn't believe it. I'm not in the movie at all. Leonard, God bless his heart, is in, but not me," Shatner, 76, told The Associated Press on Thursday. "I thought, what a decision to make, since it obviously is a decision not to make use of the popularity I have to ensure the movie has good box office. It didn't seem to be a wise business decision."

Maybe it was a clash of egos that kept William Shatner from getting a role on Star Trek, or maybe science hasn't advanced enough to build the gargantuan man-corset Shatner would need to squeeze into his Starfleet uniform again. We just don't know – all we know is that William Shatner will be nowhere to be seem when Star Trek is released next Christmas.

Maybe it's for the best, though. After all, if William Shatner can't get a role on Star Trek then none of the other original cast members are likely to get a shot either. And, if nothing else, at that will save people the hassle of trying to get Scotty's ashes down from that mountain again.  

Read more:

Shatner's Kirk Not Aboard For New Trek - Associated Press