Black actors playing noblemen at the Battle of Hastings is not just bad history - Colin Brazier

When I criticised the series with a post on X this week, it was viewed more than half a million times. Judging by the responses (and in the absence of polling, that is, let’s face it, unlikely to be commissioned), I think it’s fair to say that the viewing public is not all that comfortable with the fashion for playing fast and loose with ethnicity when it comes to televising our history.

Typical was the reply left by one of my followers, James Cox, who said: “It is disgusting. Gaslighting is done intentionally to create a false narrative. Young children will watch this and have their view of Britain's history distorted.

This is simply propaganda from those who support open borders, multiculturalism and the lie that Britain has always been a diverse nation.”

I think James is onto something. Creatives will say that colour-blind casting is really just about making sure non-white actors get roles. But if this were just about ethnic representation, where are the Asian actors in King and Conqueror?

And if it really is just about casting the best actors regardless of race, would anyone expect stories from black or Asian history to be liberally sprinkled with white actors? If Anne Boleyn can be played by a black woman, why can’t James Norton play a Zulu king?

These contradictions aside, there is something else revealed by King and Conqueror. It puts the ideological desire to present Britain as forever diverse ahead of artistic and aesthetic achievement.

As one of the replies to my original post noted: “It yanks the viewer out of the suspension of disbelief that they are viewing something real. That necessary immersion of the whole experience is what makes great cinema.”

And this is the point. It’s not just bad history, but bad art too. It’s not just the BBC who are guilty of this, but they are repeat offenders.

Take their recent dramatisation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. In one scene, we are introduced to the daughter of Cardinal Wolsey, played by an actress with more than a passing resemblance to Shamima Begum.

There is nothing in history to suggest the most powerful Christian figurehead in the late Middle Ages had anything other than white offspring, even less one who looks like an ISIS bride.

The effect, for a viewer, is incredibly jarring. As AD Tippet put it in a reply to my post: “The point of a historical representation, unlike say Bridgerton, is to put us mentally in the time and place. This casting takes us out of that as fast as if a Norman were sporting a Colt Revolver.”

Oddest of all is the fact that BBC producers obviously take great care to get other things right. Verisimilitude is the name of the game.

Costumes, weaponry, buildings. In Wolf Hall, the lighting was so ‘realistic’ it was hard to see what was going on. But, as Jamie Lear, in another response to my post, pointed out: “I heard the historical advisor for Shardlake talking painstakingly about how people would react to a cripple in medieval London (crossing themselves etc) yet totally ignore the impact of seeing a sub-Saharan abbot of a rural English monastery.”

There will be those who insist that an abbot in medieval England might possibly have been black. This, of course, is the logic that drives those who play the National Lottery.

The odds of it happening are infinitesimally small, but not categorically impossible. They will say that black people have been written out of history (and out of the Bayeux Tapestry, presumably).

I haven’t the time to re-litigate the arguments about why our culture must not be littered with ideological fairy tales when it comes to the presentation of British history as essentially multi-racial.

The woke thesis will continue to be: there were some, why shouldn’t we show them? I have only a mild objection when it happens in fiction.

Yes, I roll my eyes when the producers of Poldark put a black barmaid in a 17th-century coaching inn on remote Dartmoor.

It’s annoying and silly rather than insulting. It breaks through the fourth wall and makes the viewer feel they are being lectured as well as entertained.

But actual historical figures whose actions formed who we are today? That’s altogether different. It’s hard to imagine other countries and cultures taking such a relaxed view.

In fact, they don’t (the Egyptian government went bananas when Netflix depicted Cleopatra as sub-Saharan).

I don’t like the idea of art being cancelled. We are not Egypt. But nor do I like the idea of the BBC, which obliges license-fee-payers to cough up whether they love or loathe the results, riding roughshod over history.

As I began by saying, it would be very interesting to see where polling is on this. Maybe I’m in a tiny minority of monomaniacs for whom it has become an obsession. But I don’t think I am.

At the very least colour colour-blind casting in historical depictions is a crass distraction; at worst, a crude attempt at social engineering.

BBC creatives, because their income is guaranteed, need not worry about this too much. And, anyway, their main audience isn’t the public, but other members of the acting and production community.

They would rather win awards (granted by their woke peers), than the gratitude of viewers who care about factual accuracy.

Is there a middle way? Tom McMurty, responding to my post from New Zealand, offered this: “Perhaps they could include a message before the show saying note that no people were black back then, however, we are utilising any good actor to play the role. See the character played for who they are & know they would have been white.”

At the very least, that’s what we ought to get. A disclaimer. Something to the effect of ‘King and Conqueror' is based on a true story. Some of the facts have been changed, including the race of historical figures.’

Black actors would still get their gigs. While the rest of us would get an acknowledgement that the history being served up by the BBC is not a faithful representation of facts, but an exercise in agitprop.