I have a secret for you, internet. Don’t tell anyone, right?

I’m in love with Michael Ironside.

There, I said it.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t the kind of love between a man and a woman, or even the kind of love between a man and a fine cuban cigar. No, this is the deep, throbbing respect every man should have for another man who is, quite simply, more manly than himself.

In the dictionary, beside the definition of “man”, there is a picture of Michael Ironside.

So who is this Michael Ironside? We’ll refer to him by his proper title of The Iron Man from here on in. Or, TIM for short.

TIM first came to everyone’s attention in the film “Scanners”. If you haven’t seen it, go ahead and watch it. It’s rubbish. I can thoroughly recommend it, though, because it has a young Michael Ironside. Too young, unfortunately. For, like a fine wine, TIM gets better with age.

He has played the bad guy in Total Recall, really getting into his stride as someone who plays total dickheads with relish. “See you at the paaaardy, Richtaaah.”

Today, however, I find myself in a tough situation. For many years I have been wishing that the UK Scifi channel wasn’t so awful. Its American cousin produces a bucketload of homegrown sci-fi. Much of it is crap, but we also have them to thank for the magnificent gravel-infested update of Battlestar Galactica, as well as perpetual Stargate. We also have them to thank for cancelling Farscape. I thought this was a hideous crime until I saw the season that immediately preceded the cancellation. Another win for the Scifi Channel.

I digress, as I often do because I am mentally ill. Anyway, in addition to the UK Scifi channel being to feeble to produce it’s own content, I have also been staggered that year on year people aren’t coming up with TV series’ that feature Michael Ironside. Sure, he had a guest spot on SG-1 as some angry guy on a planet. I don’t even remember his name. And much as I like Mitch Pileggi on Stargate Atlantis, there’s only one man you go and talk to if you’re looking for a bald, aged hardass, and that’s Michael Ironside.

Finally, I’m tired of science fiction press in general covering stuff that I don’t consider to be science fiction. This has spread into the mainstream, because the X Files muddied the waters and gave everyone a taste for the paranormal. And the science fiction press crawled all over the X Files. The end result is, TV people think they can make TV about paranormal crap and call it science fiction. Recently, this has been alleviated by the aforementioned Battlestar Galactica, and Stargate has been becoming more sci-fi than it used to be (not necessarily a good thing, it turns out). Aside from, that, though, we’re stuffed. Crap like “Supernatural” and “Hex” (just been cancelled) has been cropping up in recent years, nothing new, nothing to get excited about. We also have Buffy to thank for some of this, in case you hadn’t noticed.

The end result is: no TV series with Michael Ironside, no sci-fi TV series set in space, nothing worth watching on the UK Sci-fi channel (which, again, shows very little actual sci-fi).

Last week I heard about a spaceship-based show, funded in part by the UK Scifi channel, starring Michael Ironside.

I had to lie down for a bit.

I was getting excited until I read some of the outline today.

It’s called Ice Planet. It seems to be either very near future or present day, and it starts like this: Earth is told about a kickass growing alien spaceship hidden in the jungles of Sumatra, which needs to be used to fight off an alien attack. The good news is it succeeds. The bad news is, Earth gets turned into a desert anyway. Upon seeing a wormhole, our heroes decide to take their fancy new alien ship into it, in the hope it’ll take them back in time to resolve the problem. This is the equivalent of me seeing a rabbit hole and assuming it leads to the Taj Mahal last week.

On the other side of the wormhole, our brave heroes immediately crash the ship on some kind of ice planet. There, they learn of this new planet’s inhabitants, and about Earth’s role in whatever kind of war was going on. They also find an Aleph Tree. What the fuck this is, I don’t know.

The producers claim the series is “a cross between Star Wars, Star Trek and The X Files”. From that, we can probably expect terrible dialogue, people with bumpy heads and a serialised story that doesn’t make any sense. I guess they also forgot to mention “Lost”, because, you know, “mystery series with a bunch of stranded people” is basically the way to describe either of these series. I could also point out similarities with Battlestar Galactica, Space:1999 and Babylon 5, especially since these are based on actual observations of the premise, rather than a sales soundbite used to pitch to advertisers.

TIM himself please the Captain of Earth’s newly discovered alien ship, the Magellan. His name is General Jonas Trager, which is a pleasingly kickass name. I have a suspicion that nothing else about this series will kick any ass.

Except Michael.