TO BOLDLY GO WHERE GRETA HAS GONE BEFORE: Star Trek’s William Shatner warns ‘we’re dying’ as he makes King Charles plea.

Shatner came under fire from fans who reminded the star that he recently went to space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Viewers of the ITV programme took to social media to protest his warning.

One moaned: “William Shatner didn’t care about the climate when he went into space polluting the air with rocket fuel, a case of do what I say but not what I do.” While someone else said: “@GMB Williams Shatner, on your news, is a hypocrite and all these people travelling around the world talking about climate change.”

Another raged: “Did I just hear that right? William Shatner who apparently went to space says climate change is due to stupid people.” While a fourth fan posted: “The irony. William Shatner, the man that went to the edge of space in the Blue Origin for fun. Hypocrisy at its absolute finest.”

He became the oldest person to travel to space in 2021, experiencing several minutes of weightlessness as the rocket hit zero-G. But his trip left him feeling grief and an “overwhelming sadness”, writing in his book Boldly Go: “The extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna … things that took 5 billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread.

“My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.” He said the wealthy should be “trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live.”

If only Shatner had made his bones portraying a man who lived in an optimistic view of the world’s future, perhaps he wouldn’t be so filled with stereotypical leftist Malthusian doom.  Especially when the first go-around of Star Trek reruns competed against so much early ’70s doomsday porn: