In the pages of British Vogue, Ms Hanna Flint is dismayed that new adaptations of works by Emily Brontë and Jane Austen have,

How very dare they.

Says Ms Flint,

Richness and relevance, and imagination, being determined by race, of course.

I’m not at all sure what historical inclusivity might mean, given the racial demographics of rural England at the time of Brontë and Austen, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, what Ms Flint seems to want sounds more like ahistorical inclusivity. And whether incongruous, politically corrected racial casting choices constitute “imagination,” rather than a following of Very Modern Fashion, is a question I leave to the reader.

“Why Is The Next Wave Of Period Dramas So White?” asks the headline of the article, with the obligatory note of disapproval. An understood tutting, one presumed of its readers. Yet I’m struggling to picture Ms Flint making demands that period dramas produced in China and set in the Han Dynasty be adjusted so as to accommodate “excluded or marginalised” actors who resemble Jack Hawkins or Charles Gray.

Ms Flint, “a mixed-race woman, of British and Tunisian heritage,” informs us that, despite her enthusiasm for the genre, “I was left somewhat cold by the news that all these remakes had cast the protagonists as white once again.” Yet this train of thought terminates before reaching the possibility that others, perhaps some larger number, might be left somewhat cold by modish anachronism and jarring contrivance.

It seems to have escaped Ms Flint that, for many, the appeal of period dramas is, as it were, a holiday in time – a brief respite from modernity, its politics and paraphernalia, and perhaps even from those “diverse, multicultural surroundings” that Ms Flint feels should be the foundation of all drama and period-specific programming.

Whatever its merits in terms of modern “workforce inclusivity,” ahistorical, racially ostentatious casting does, for many viewers, risk breaking the spell, making any suspension of disbelief more difficult, while shifting the focus away from then and back to now.

Previously and related, on sex-swapping Bond.