By Grabthar's hammer, what an actor!

RIP Alan Rickman, who died last Friday. He was romantically wonderful in Truly Madly Deeply and scarily psychopathic in Die Hard, but the role for which I remember him most fondly is Alexander Dane in the Star Trek spoof (or should that be homage) Galaxy Quest. Dane is an English actor, who to his chagrin owes his fame to having played an alien in a sci-fi TV show, long-cancelled but still beloved by its devoted fans. Like Alec Guiness, whose ambivalent relationship with his character in Star Wars is well-known, he resents the fans who try to prompt him into declaiming his character's catch-phrase and the cheesy supermaket opening appearances he is forced to attend to maintain his income. Only when the cast of the TV show are kidnapped by real aliens, who think that they are real space heroes, does he have to play his part for real and in it discovers new meaning.

The compilation here contains some of his best moments, thought not for me the best of all. The crew are in a shuttlecraft, descending to a planet to search for a way of repairing their damanged ship, when Guy Fleegman, who played a minor part in a single episode, starts to panic. His character was a "redshirt", someone who exists purely to be killed off early in the episode to show that the danger is serious, and he fears that will be his role in real life too. The rest of the cast (except Dane) try to reassure him; perhaps he will turn out to be the plucky comic relief? His whimpering is interrupted when Alan Rickman from the back of the shuttlecraft asks in acid tones: "Are we there yet?"