Target practice | 17 January 2019

As the Allies advanced towards Germany in September 1944, their supplies were brought all the way from western Normandy in a constant shuttle convoy known as the Red Ball Express. If you were making a realistic movie about this, three quarters of the truck drivers would be played by black actors, because that’s how it was in real life.

Similar rules would have to apply to any remake of Zulu or Zulu Dawn. It is an awkward but inescapable historical fact that there was no diversity whatsoever among Cetewayo’s Impis: they were all, resolutely, from the same African tribe. At the Battle of Crécy, on the other hand, every single participant was white European — even the misleadingly named Black Prince — so any movie version probably wouldn’t involve a call to Samuel L. Jackson’s casting agent.

You could go through all of history like this and make pretty sensible guesses on the ethnicity of the participants. Sometimes you might be surprised. For example, researching a novel I wrote set at the Battle of Arnhem, I found that at least one British unit had a black paratrooper (naturally nicknamed ‘Chalky’ by his comrades). So I included him, not because he was at all representative, but because I thought it was a quirk of history too interesting to resist.

Anyway, to Les Misérables and the casting of David Oyelowo as Javert. Can anyone point me to any evidence that there were black police inspectors in early 19th- century France; or that a gentleman of West African extraction was what Victor Hugo had in mind when he created this son of a galley slave? Otherwise, I’ll have to assume that this is another depressing example of the BBC’s woke quota targets — 15 per cent representation of black and minority ethnic actors on screen by 2020 — being given precedence over verisimilitude, artistic integrity and viewer satisfaction.