If journalism is the first draft of history the biopic is now a close second, having become the staple output of many television drama departments. Recently figures as diverse as the Queen, Margaret Thatcher and Winnie Mandela have been given the treatment. Historians undoubtedly ground their teeth as these accounts gave the protagonist undue importance and distorted events for dramatic effect. For their mantra has long been that history is made through the interaction of structure and agency, a process in which the individual, however famous, plays but a part. However recent US research [Andrew Butler et al, 'Using popular films to enhance class room learning', Psychological Science, 20:9 (2009)] shows that even amongst Ivy League students, film versions of the past can exert more influence on perceptions of the past than do academic texts. The power of the moving image compared to the immobile word has long been suspected. As Gore Vidal wrote of the Hollywood historical romances of his youth: ‘we are both defined and manipulated by [cinematic] fictions of such potency that they are able to replace our own experience, often becoming our sole experience of reality’. From what we know of media effects, this process of confusing fiction for reality is made more certain if the same kind of fiction is transmitted over a prolonged period. Read more:  http://short.to/16vzy