From The Forsyte Saga in the 1960s to the latest season of Bridgerton, period drama has long been a favourite genre with TV audiences. But should such shows reflect our changing tastes as viewers, or offer an accurate view of the people and periods they depict? We asked a panel of experts
THE BIG QUESTION
The most popular films of my youth were war films. They were about how Britain won a war – and that could be any war you cared to mention. They were great fun and, mostly, patriotic rubbish.
I’m a journalist and occasional historian, and something the two professions share is a respect for the sacredness of truth. Both are in the business of bringing events to life through the power of fact, not falsification. They may sometimes be guilty of distortion and sloppy analysis, but to be plain wrong is unethical and unprofessional. The gulf between fact and fiction is one that should not be crossed – or if crossed, should stand corrected.
Many playwrights, filmmakers and novelists disagree. To them, history is a stimulus to artistic licence, material to be exploited and abused for dramatic effect. Their considerations are audience appeal, profit and, often, politics. They leave it to historians to worry about truth. This, to me, is mendacity.
I have always found ‘faction’ (in which real events are the basis for fiction) hard to stomach. I can appreciate ‘docudrama’, which dramatises the events, or the novels of Hilary Mantel, as attempts to deepen our understanding of the past. Mantel insisted that her goal was always to be as accurate as the facts allowed. She did not deliberately create false events. The same was not true of The Crown and its much-documented faking of stories. The fact the team behind the show took such pains to cast actors that resembled their real-life counterparts simply added a patina of reality to the fabrication. The result was an audience ignorant of what was true or false.
I appreciate that history – as with journalism – involves selection, and that selection itself can be motivated by a desire to twist the truth. Each age puts pressure on historians to select material in a manner that respects the sensitivity or bias of nations, groups or individuals. The duty of the historian is to see behind such bias. The task is to reveal what happened, why and how.
In an age of artificial intelligence and online ‘deep fakery’, the truth has never been more precious. The world of fiction has no
