James Delingpole James Delingpole

Target practice | 17 January 2019

Plus: Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins shows you what equality between the sexes really looks like

issue 19 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.

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