In the larky heydays of the 1960s Gene Roddenberry pitched a novel idea to the television moguls of NBC: a science-fiction adventure series in which a crew of futuristic putains et souteneurs would roam the universe in a spaceship shaped rather like a rolled condom with two tampon applicators attached. Roddenberry proposed that his starship voyeurs would "boldly go where no man [or woman!] had gone before," attempting acts which no man or woman had attempted before. The doddering stodgy NBC executives asked Roddenberry what he had been drinking. And they laughed at him.