WITH six months to go before the release of the new Star Trek movie, the Starship Enterprise is already under attack — not from Klingons or Romulans, but from Scots, outraged by chief engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott’s unconvincing accent.

Internet chat rooms for Star Trek fans, known as “Trekkies”, are already abuzz with complaints about the English comic actor Simon Pegg’s poor attempt at a Celtic burr.

Paramount hopes the new film, which is called simply Star Trek, will give the franchise a new lease of life, just as Casino Royale did for James Bond. The studio has released a two-minute trailer to crank up anticipation.

“From the trailer, I think Simon Pegg is going to be competing with Mel Gibson for ‘worst Scottish accent’ award,” said one fan on the website Trekmovie.com.

On other websites the controversial accent is variously described as “awful”, “rubbish” and “hopeless”.

Alexander McEwan, a 27-year-old administrator from Edinburgh who organises Star Trek fan meetings, said: “A lot of people in the club and across Scotland will agree that Pegg’s accent is a caricature.

“It is a typical Hollywood stereotype — it doesn’t matter where in Scotland someone is supposed to be from, as long as he sounds remotely Scottish and it doesn’t matter if it is accurate or not.”

Pegg, who starred in Hot Fuzz and the comic horror film Shaun of the Dead, was a surprise choice as Scotty.

Glasgow-born actor James McAvoy was once linked with the role. Paul McGillion, the Scottish-Canadian star of Stargate Atlantis, was favourite, and Greg Hemphill from Still Game was also up for the role.

Roseanna Cunningham, an SNP MSP and avid Trekkie who has watched the latest trailer, said: “The omens aren’t good. Terrible Scots accents would seem to be a particular Star Trek tradition. All I can say is that it takes a serious amount of hard work to get a really bad Scottish accent.

“Maybe the problem is that to the film-makers, a true Scots accent is an incomprehensible language for audiences that they cannot broadcast, so they go for some bizarre notion of what they think is a Scots accent. I don’t think we took Scotty’s accent in the original series seriously so we probably just have to take it.”

Alan Young, curator of a memorial exhibition to James Doohan — the Canadian actor who played Scotty in the original 1960s Star Trek television series — in Linlithgow (where the character was reputedly born), said: “Maybe once the film gets into the cinema, people will be so caught up in the action that they won’t notice that his accent is bad.

“As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one Scotty, and that is James Doohan and no one can touch him, but I am sure Simon Pegg will do his own thing with the role.”

Attempts by non-Scots to do Scottish accents have repeatedly provoked controversy. Mel Gibson raised a few hackles as the rebel William Wallace in Braveheart, and the choice of Frenchman Christopher Lambert for the title role in Highlander seemed perverse when Sean Connery was cast as a Spanish-Egyptian dandy.

Star Trek is arguably the most successful TV series of all time, spawning feature films, small-screen spin-off series and merchandise. It picked up converts with repeats in the early 1970s, and acquired a new audience on video and DVD.

It has even influenced social attitudes and everyday speech. The phrase “Beam me up, Scotty” entered the language as an expression of wanting to be somewhere else.

At the original casting sessions for the TV series, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry asked Doohan which nationality he thought the engineer should be, and Doohan replied that the world’s greatest engineers had been Scots.

Pegg is from Gloucester, but is married to a Scot. In one interview he said: “I made Scotty’s accent northwestern Scottish — just above Glasgow.” In another, however, he admitted the accent was a struggle.

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