Shatner to boldly leave Priceline

TV legend waves goodbye to ailing Web site

William Shatner of Star Trek fame has parted ways with online reverse auction house Priceline.com following a share dive that has seen the value of his holding plummet from £10 million to £155,000.

Mr Shatner was a well-known frontman for the company and did a range of commercials and voiceovers for which he was paid in stock. The commercials, in which he parodied himself as a folk crooner, have been variously described as "memorable", "well-received" and "f**king awful".

Not that he's entirely stupid - Will managed to sell off 35,000 of his 125,000 shares when the share price was a little healthier and is £5.5 million better off for it. Not bad for an old man living off a character he played aeons ago - especially one who admitted he never uses Priceline anyway (don't do first-class plane tickets, see).

What else do you want to know? Yes, Priceline is still in all sorts of trouble. Shares currently stand at $2.22, a bit of a drop from the high of $162 last year. Er, it failed in its lastest bid for funding and so had to cut jobs. Its CFO - formerly a top exec in Citigroup - quit last month. General doom and gloom.

However we do have to give special praise to The Times' New York correspondent. Any story on William Shatner would obviously not be complete with a mention of his stunning spoken-word album The Transformed Man. We won't go into any further detail or we'll be here all day. However, we were most impressed with this beautifully constructed sentence from the Times story:

"His uniquely tortured and Shakespearean interpretation of Mr Tamborine Man has attained cult status among young people with too much spare time."

Nice job. ®

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