White knights and black Saxons

The history of multicultural realism

I’m a difficult person to watch historical drama with; some might say insufferable. Perhaps because I have a below average capacity to suspend disbelief, I find deliberate historical mistakes jarring - and the more I know about an era of history, the more I grunt and sigh and feel compelled to point out inaccuracies. On holiday in Scotland a couple of years back I made my children watch Braveheart while I went through all its falsehoods until, unusually, they decided to go to bed early.

While I have a broad interest in history, the Norman Conquest is to me perhaps the most fascinating subjects of all time: it permanently Francified English society, bringing us into the orbit of our larger and more sophisticated neighbour, turned our language into a Germanic-Latinate hybrid, and created an almost ethnic dimension to our class system.

It’s also because the year of three battles itself is like a HBO script, a clash of kings featuring the Godwin clan, the remnants of the House of Wessex, the ferociously competent Norman Duke William and the charismatic Viking maniac Harald Hardrada - so packed with drama, plot twists and gruesome deaths. If there’s a perfect backdrop for a show to reach Game of Thrones god-tier status in the medieval genre, above your Last Kingdoms and Vikings, this is it.

The BBC’s King and Conqueror is not that show, and watching it was a frustrating experience. I don’t know why they took so many liberties with the timeline, when the real story was more compelling. All the plot points from the first three episodes – William attending Edward’s coronation, his meeting with Harold in England, the murder of is father by the French king, the civil war between Mercia and Wessex – are made up.

Broader historical inaccuracies also jar. It’s highly unlikely that Harold’s elder brother Sweyn deflowered a bride, ‘as is my right as a lord’, because the droit du seigneur is almost certainly a myth. For some reason, the BBC has William with a moustache and Harold without, when one of the first things you learn about 1066 is that the Saxons had long droopy moustaches and the Normans were clean-shaven – as is clear from the Bayeux Tapestry.

And then, of course, there is the mysterious and inexplicable presence of black people in 11^th century northern Europe, now a ubiquitous feature of any programme set in England’s past. Almost every historical drama, and every single one on the BBC, now portrays pre-Windrush Britain as multiracial in a way that is historically implausible, indeed bizarre.

Why this has to come to pass is an interesting case study of human psychology, as are the reasons people are willing to defend it – and no one working in the film industry, nor the ivory tower of history, seems to publicly criticise the practice.

Colour-blind casting has an older pedigree in the theatre, and for obvious reasons. Theatre is not aimed at the same level of realism, and so is permitted far more artistic licence; the audience is nowhere near as immersed as they are in a cinema or television. The stage has always creatively played with roles, and that’s part of the fun (if you enjoy theatre).

It’s especially true of Shakespeare, whose plays feature universal themes that have been adapted around the world. The Bard belongs to humanity. As far back as I can remember, from memories of being dragged to the theatre against my will as a teenager, Shakespeare plays have featured actors from diverse backgrounds, often performed in 19th or 20^th century period costume, that can be appreciated on many, non-literal, levels. (Usually, from memory, as an analogy for the evils of Margaret Thatcher.)

Historical drama on television is somewhat different; accuracy is normally a major aim, even if our ideas about the past are always fanciful. Modern depictions of the Middle Ages invariably present people in far darker colours than would have been the reality, and with much gloomier skies, as well as having everyone dressed in leather for some reason. In some cases, an accurate rendition of the past would actually be more immersion-breaking than these convenient tropes. Yet while historical depictions can never be entirely accurate, it is only in the past decade or so that cultural elites have become intent on deliberately lying about the past.

This is especially contradictory when one considers that in recent years there has been far more attention paid to historical accuracy, now more authentic in dress, weaponry and location, with historical consultants hired to make the genre far more realistic than it was a generation ago – while at the same introducing one glaring form of anachronism for obviously political reasons.

This was the case with The Hollow Crown, the BBC production of the Henriad which screened in 2012 and 2016, and accelerated the trend for colour-blind casting, or as I prefer to call it, ancestrally anachronistic casting. This was not a theatrical production at the National, where Henry V is dressed up in 20^th century combat gear or Lear is a corporate executive and it’s actually about FATCHA.

It was a flagship show with a considerable budget, rightly praised in all quarters for its acting, with purposefully chosen and authentic-looking locations, accurate military hardware and dress; the Percys even spoke in Northumbrian accents, rather than the inauthentic RP-thespian style of past productions. At the same time, Edward of York was black and Margaret of Anjou was mixed race; the Bishop of Carlisle, who makes the famous warning that ‘the blood of the English will water the ground’, was played by a strongly-accented British-Tanzanian actor, which came across as jarring, since the purpose of that speech is that it is an appeal to fellow countrymen.

It goes without saying that this is not a criticism of the actors, and its stars Sophie Okonedo and Paterson Joseph in particular are highly talented and respected in the field; it is simply a comment on casting for political reasons. The following year I watched Joseph play Scrooge at the Old Vic, which my wife and I were partly drawn to as fans of Peep Show. It was a masterful performance, and, no, I wasn’t heckling from the back about early Victorian demography. The stage doesn’t make claims to realism; in contrast, where television makers are otherwise aiming at authenticity, such casting can only come across as a political statement.

I engage in this kind of throat-clearing because it’s a natural human instinct to question the motives of people who object to symbolic but petty issues. No, this doesn’t affect me; yes, I think it’s important. Telling the truth about history is important.

It was the second series of the Hollow Crown which first provoked public debate about this practice, and that was indeed the argument from many: why would you even care? But as well as supporting it on the grounds of artistic licence, it was striking that one or two historians were willing to defend the casting of Okonedo as historians, because we don’t know for certain that ‘the she-wolf of France’ was white.

Indeed, the one second-hand description we have of her, written by an Italian traveller to his patron Bianca Maria Visconti, describes how ‘The Englishman told me that the queen is a most handsome woman, though somewhat dark and not so beautiful as your Serenity.’

‘Dark’ in this context means by the standards of western Europe, and this may have been flattery aimed at the Duchess of Milan; one painting depicts the queen as a redhead. The truth is that we don’t know, but Margaret of Anjou was a 15^th century princess from the Franco-German border, whose lineage is well-known; I think we can reasonably infer that she was of European appearance, and her many enemies would have commented if she wasn’t.

I found the response from the historians of the Great Awokening quite revealing, an insight into how people in almost any field will sacrifice the principled search for truth if their career depends on the right politics. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over? A black woman led the Lancastrians in the War of the Roses.

This trend only accelerated with the success of the Hollow Crown, while historical productions otherwise became far more assiduous about general accuracy; the second series of Wolf Hall, which came out last November, was notable for its meticulous attention to detail. At the same time, Thomas Wyatt was played by an Egyptian-born actor, something criticised as ‘absurd’ by his descendent Petronella Wyatt.

Director Peter Kosminsky defended this - and other colour-blind casting in the show - by saying how he was ‘delighted’ there were ‘a number of parts played by people of colour’. He argued that they ‘chose the best actors who auditioned for the roles… And obviously, we aren’t playing lookalikes in the series. Damian [Lewis] is many things, but he doesn’t resemble Henry VIII particularly. Jonathan Pryce doesn’t particularly resemble Cardinal Wolsey.’ This rather sounded like someone trying to convince themselves of something they know to be untrue, but must believe in order to function within the regime.

If you look in the back pages of The Stage – or at least this is how it was a few years ago – you will see directories of working actors listing things like age, height and ‘ethnic types’, eg ‘can play European or Latin American’.

Their range is limited by their appearance, sex and age, with some liberties taken; Dustin Hoffman was only five years younger than his older woman Anne Bancroft, but few are aware of this fact when they watch The Graduate. If it had been noticeable, that would have been a huge failure of the director and actors.

Henry VIII is arguably the most recognisable figure in English history, and countless men have portrayed the Tudor monster, among them Robert Shaw, Richard Burton, Brian Blessed, Ray Winstone and Charles Laughton (although in my view Sid James surpassed them all; he really became Henry VIII in Carry On Henry).

None of them hugely resembled the monarch in detail, but they were all cast within their range, enough for their acting skills to enable us to immerse ourselves. The aim of every director and every actor, after all, is to enable this immersion.

This range limits all actors; Ridley Scott’s biopic of Napoleon was ruined for me because Joaquin Phoenix, then in his late forties, was clearly way too old to play the dynamic young French military genius. Bonaparte was 23 when the story begins, ambitious and energetic, and Phoenix had the manner of a middle-aged man exhausted by asking his teenagers to clean up their room (a manner I know all too well.)

Actors are limited by age and ‘ethnic type’. Omar Sharif playing a German was not plausible. John Wayne playing a Mongol was absurd. Spaniard Antonio Banderas as an Iraqi was believable, to a Western audience at least. Egyptian-American Remi Malek as the Parsi Freddy Mercury? We can suspend our disbelief, even though the Coptic actor looks like he should be playing a Pharoah. Some actors have a wide or surprising ethnic range; Karim Kadjar, a Savoyard diplomat in Wolf Hall, is an Iranian of very aristocratic lineage, but looks northern European.

All actors are confined by their physical form, and deliberately casting one outside of this range counters our suspension of disbelief; to do is obviously not about finding the best actor, but making a political statement.

A more realistic defence came from Wolf Hall’s executive producer Colin Callender, who said at a Broadcasting Press Guild Event that: ‘The world has changed since the first series. We felt that diverse casting was appropriate and something we should and wanted to do. It’s as simple as that.’

What ‘the world has changed’ sounds like is an admission that it has become accepted among creatives that art should reflect the dominant political ideals; art should actively promote multicultural Britain, and artists are wise to signal their support for diversity and equality lest they be seen as being on the wrong side of history.

It is a running theme in modern progressive thought that art must serve politics, to further their idea of justice, something it shares with its distant relative, communism. Stalin was perceptive in his understanding of the value of art as propaganda, and led the way with socialist realism, describing how the artist ‘must show life the way it is’ but pointing out that ‘he cannot help noticing, and showing, the forces that are leading it towards socialism’. Socialism is inevitable, and so, as an artist, you want to show the inevitable, surely? (Or do you want to be shot, perhaps?)

Modern progressives promote a sort of multicultural realism, one in which the dynamics of diverse societies are often jarringly inaccurate, Eastenders being the most famous, flagship example. The past plays a key role in this project because it will help shape the future; educated members of the industry know it’s not truthful, but do you want to be the BAFTA member who objects?

Over the past ten years, this trend has accelerated, and consciously so. An episode of Dr Who from the David Tennant era has a black character worried about standing out in Tudor England; by the time Peter Capaldi is occupying the Tardis, that contradiction has been resolved because now the past was diverse. Between 2010 and 2015 it had been decided that Britain had always been multicultural, after all.

Since then, almost every historical drama has been colour-blind, and it’s often jarring or just absurd. In the 2017 BBC drama Gunpowder, we see Catholics hiding at a safe house in Jacobean London, trying to evade the authorities, and they have a black guy posted at the door. I mean, you’re trying to look inconspicuous!

There was a recent reworking of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, in which the lawyer Jaggers is played by a black rapper, John Wemmick is Asian, and Estella is played by an actress of mixed Mauritian and Thai descent.

Or take Wicked Little Letters, a comedy set in a small town in 1920s Britain in which the population has the social composition of an upmarket area of inner London in the 2020s. Even the much more distant past is given the treatment, with The Sandman apparently showing a multiracial 13^th century England, while Robert the Bruce has black people walking around in medieval Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Perhaps that can be explained, and history is full of improbable-sounding diversity that isn’t well known. There were thousands of Britons in Ottoman-era Smyrna, for instance, and many Scots in 17^th century Poland. But if you made a historical drama set in 19^th century Anatolia, and more than two British people turn up, you’d probably want to weave that into the storyline to explain it - otherwise it leaves the audience confused and breaks the immersion.

Wartime diversity is especially important because of the symbolic importance of the Second World War as the birth of a new Britain. This pivotal moment is now usually presented as one in which a multicultural population struggled against Nazism, symbolised by a West Indian quoting Tennyson to Churchill in a Tube carriage in Darkest Hour.

In the 2021 film Munich: The Edge of War, this is much more explicit. Chamberlain’s adviser, Cecil Syers, is black, something criticised by the Morning Star for glossing over the racism of the British Empire. (As the Empire was so monstrous to the far Left, I can see why this looks like an attempt to give the British moral prestige when they were evil and exploitative; why not go the full hog and cast some black Nazis?)

The film features a Special Operations Executive agent played by an Asian actress, perhaps a nod to Noor Inayat Khan, except she breaks a sort of fourth wall when, obviously noticing someone’s confusion about her appearance, says ‘if you're going to ask where I'm from, the answer's Nottingham’.

At the time the character would have been born, Nottingham’s foreign-born population was 0.63 per cent, the vast majority of those being – in order – French, Russian, American and German. It’s possible, if not probable, that there was not a single Asian person with a Nottinghamshire accent at the time, nor would there be for many years.

That sort of ‘where are you really from’ riposte would make sense if it was set in the 1970s or 80s, when people were first getting used to the novelty of British-born Asians. It’s a deliberate anachronism in 1940, and the joke would fit an absurdist comedy; in a straight drama it only makes sense if we assume that the viewers now believe Britain to be multicultural at the time. Which, for younger viewers, may be true.

When my daughter was about 11, and I was talking to her about the past (as always), she asked why all the politicians and major figures she learned about from Victorian times were white; she genuinely thought that 19^th century Britain was as diverse as it is today, and why wouldn’t she? All the historical drama she watched presented it that way. It struck me as strange that a country might deliberately teach its children something to be wildly untrue.

One reason why honesty in historical drama matters is because an unprecedented proportion of the public are now largely ignorant of history outside of the Second World War, and so the importance of television is magnified. Many even well-educated people get their impression of history largely through fiction, whether it’s novels or films. The responsibility to be truthful is greater than ever, and yet an entire generation are being brought up to believe something false.

Few historians criticise the trend, or even deign to notice, and some will even justify it. After the Sam Mendes audio version of Oliver Twist featured a black actor, David Olusoga responded to criticism by saying ‘Who knew Victorian Britain was so diverse? People who spend their time reading books rather than spreading hatred.’

Britain in the early years of Queen Victoria had a black population in the very low tens of thousands, in a country of around 20 million. The South Asian population was smaller still. It wasn’t that diverse at all, and I’m not sure which history books claim otherwise.

Further back, and in that time of leather jerkins and dark skies, the non-European population was almost non-existent. There were individual stories, of course, strays and stowaways whose skeletal remains present intriguing questions that can never be answered. But they were incredibly rare, and so don’t work as tropes.

I suspect that Olusoga’s argument pointed to the real motive for defending colour-blind casting, that it annoys all the right people. A few years back Laurence Fox, an actor turned anti-woke provocateur, made remarks about diverse casting in Sam Mendes’s 1917. Fox, appearing on James Delingpole’s podcast, criticised the presence of Sikh actors in the war film, saying that ‘there is something institutionally racist about forcing diversity on people in that way.’

Several people pointed out that there were in fact Sikhs in the war, and indeed large numbers of Indians fighting on the Western Front. It was one of the weakest examples to use in an argument against racial inaccuracy, even if one might guess that the director’s inclusion of Indian troops was a nod to modern sensibilities. And the fact that Lawrence Fox was annoyed will have only convinced people that they’re doing the right thing.

Yet this is not a good heuristic; the biggest hacks in history have all made art aimed at annoying the right people, because that is the goal of the regimes they serve and aim to flatter. Art directed at political goals is usually bad art.

What was done out of kindness and pity is eventually done out of fear and deadening conformity. Colour-blind casting was originally justified as a way of providing roles for non-white actors, and then to make history feel inclusive, but is now done because there is no choice.

Part of it is now law; since 2017 the BBC’s diversity code of practice has ruled that the corporation is pledged to take action with ‘on-air portrayal and casting; workforce diversity of commissioning and production teams’. There is huge pressure to make these political casting decisions and, since everyone else does it, do you want to be the first one to stop clapping Comrade Stalin?

There is a more ambitious aim, as well. As progressive goals have expanded, there has developed a far more concerted effort to make British history more multiracial, with some pretty tenuous claims made about the past. (This is often quite contradictory; Britain was rebuilt by immigrants after the war, before which it was incorrigibly racist and backward, but it was also multiracial.) Colour-blind casting is part of that effort, the aim being to actually suggest that this is what it was like.

Dr Who producer Steven Moffat once explained the rationale by saying that: ‘Young people watching have to know that they’ve a place in the future. That really matters. You have to care profoundly what children’s shows in particular say about where you’re going to be.

‘And we’ve kind of got to tell a lie; we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, “to hell with it, this is the imaginary, better vision of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.”’

Perhaps this is noble or high minded, but I don’t think it’s a healthy sign that artistic elites so obviously present historical untruths as facts. Many defenders of this noble lie fail to appreciate how others care about accuracy and truth for its own sake. It annoys people to see obvious untruths being told about the past, and disconcerting when this has always been the hallmark of authoritarian and extreme nationalist movements. It is also demoralising to see otherwise intelligent people acquiesce to falsehoods; indeed, it is notable to contrast elite concerns about ‘misinformation’ and their sanguine response to the distortion of history, a clear-cut case of misinformation.

If television makers wish to make people feel that they have ‘a future’, I suspect that they are being very naïve about the highly-charged role of history in multicultural societies. It may not be wise to turn history into a competition between people’s ancestors, unleashing the passions Francis Fukuyama warned about many years ago. This question of who owns a country’s past has been characteristic of societies which fell into sectarian and ethnic conflict, and I don’t think it’s wise to raise it.

Paterson Joseph went on to write a novel about Ignatius Sancho, and when asked about the famous composer and abolitionist, voiced his view that ‘This is as much my home as anybody — almost more so because ancestrally we paid in blood, sweat and tears for the creation of Barclays Bank, Lloyd’s, the great institutions… they were all based on slavery. The wealth of our country was based on free labour, and that free labour was African labour — our ancestors.’

Joseph’s instincts are the norm for most people in almost every society, indeed they are closer to mine than either of us are to the psychologically unusual progressives who dominate western cultural institutions, and whose response to their ancestors being downgraded is ‘why do you even care?’

Wokeness, after all, is two things, an alliance between a small, mostly white elite with unusually high levels of empathy and guilt, and a much larger coalition of ethnic minorities whose aim is to raise the prestige of their own group. Their aim is not equality or justice in the abstract, but to maximise the interest and prestige of their group, and to push for asymmetrical multiculturalism which favours them, and which these psychologically unusual white progressives think is fair.

Most people are not in favour of colour-blind casting in the abstract; they favour it when it favours them, and are notably hostile to supposed ethnic miscasting if their group is seen to lose out.

As an example John Leguizamo, a Colombian-American actor of mixed indigenous descent, criticised the recent casting of James Franco as Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro in Alina of Cuba: ‘How is this still going on? How is Hollywood excluding us but stealing our narratives as well? No more appropriation Hollywood and streamers! Boycott! This F’d up!... I don’t got a [problem] with Franco but he ain’t Latino!’

Castro’s father was from Galicia in northern Spain; his mother from the Canaries. Franco’s family are Portuguese on his father’s side, and he is actually a pretty close match in terms of ethnic types; the two men look quite alike.

The 2024 casting of an Israeli actress, Noa Cohen, to play the Virgin Mary provoked much offence, which seemed like a pretty feeble objection when Mary was, you know, Jewish. Similarly, there were accusations of ‘whitewashing’ because another Israeli, Gal Gadot, was cast as Cleopatra, which apparently should have gone to an Arab or African actress.

Gadot is of Ashkenazi descent and perhaps on the light-skinned side, but certainly within the range, since some Middle Eastern people are quite fair; there are red-haired Arabs just as there are swarthy Englishmen. While Cleopatra’s ethnicity has been a source of contention down the years, she was certainly of predominantly Macedonian ancestry. People weren’t objecting to ‘authenticity’, they just didn’t want one of their people losing out on a role, especially to an Israeli, who they view as European transplants.

With much greater historical justification, Egyptians also took umbrage at American television makers portraying Cleopatra as black, and why shouldn’t they ? Isn’t this sort of misrepresentation of people’s ancestors and historical icons vaguely insulting, as well as absurd?

Colour-blind television makers perhaps see themselves as white knights helping the world’s disadvantaged, but people who view race politics in that altruistic way are very rare; most see it as a way of furthering group interests, and raising the status of their ancestors is an important part of it.

Historical diversity is propaganda, but as propaganda it is not very effective. Joseph Heath, co-author of the Rebel Sell, noted in a hugely insightful post last year that ‘One of the charming things about Americans is that they’re only good at making propaganda when they don’t realize they’re making propaganda. As soon as they try to do it intentionally, they suck. As a result, Hollywood studios used to be really good at promoting liberal values, but once they became convinced that this was their special calling, they started to become much worse at it.’

Over his lifetime noted, ‘it’s as though subtlety acquired some sort of moral stigma… it is apparently no longer sufficient to advance progressive values, one must also draw attention to the fact that one is advancing progressive values. This is most obvious in casting choices, where the effort to find a plausible rationale for introducing greater diversity has in many cases been replaced by the opposite desire, to introduce diversity where it makes no sense. The latter, presumably, constitutes a stronger signal of commitment – it shows that one is doing it, not because the story calls for it, but rather despite what the story calls for.’

The problem, he points out, is that it is immersion-breaking. ‘While it does not technically “break the fourth wall,” it has the same effect. Not only does it draw attention to the artificiality of the product, it does so in a way that references the audience. And yet when people complain about this, the standard response has been to tell them that they are foolish for having become immersed in the first place – after all, isn’t the whole thing obviously fake? In so doing, the creators of these cultural products are simply forfeiting the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of artistic techniques, which is precisely the ability to captivate an audience.’

Whereas left-leaning creatives have often used television and film to influence our ideas of the past, forming popular tropes like the cruelty of Victorian capitalists or the stultifying prison of marriage before the sexual revolution – James Cameron’s Titanic being a pre-eminent example - the multicultural realism of 2020s is far cruder.

One thinks of Theodore Dalrymple’s famous line that ‘the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.’ By this measure it certainly succeeds – but to what end?