GOOD news film fans; it appears movie companies are looking to hire academics to ensure scripts based on true stories or set in past eras are free of historical inaccuracies.

So presumably that means no more Victorian gothic thrillers with cockney characters using late 20th-century slang, or westerns with cowboys wielding guns that hadn’t been invented yet, let alone cavewomen wearing makeup or Roman soldiers sporting wristwatches.

That must surely be a good thing, particularly when you discover the target of this historical nitpicking is the “prestige” end of the market, more particularly those movies which might challenge for an Oscar. So bonkers fantasies with dinosaurs chasing the aforementioned cavewomen (yes, One Million Years BC was on the other day) or the anachronistic but charming A Knight’s Tale, with medieval banquet guests bopping to David Bowie’s Golden Years (among other things), would presumably be safe.

Then you start to discover this isn’t so much to do with cinematic quality control as movie chiefs seeking to outdo one another, the whole idea being to shoot your rival’s epic Oscar hopeful down by claiming it’s historically inaccurate.

Still, if it actually means cutting out stupid errors that has to be a good thing – doesn’t it?

Trouble is, experts don’t have a great track record in helping movies get it right. Some sci-fi film directors hired scientists as advisers and still managed to depict “impossible” situations – at least in the eyes of other experts.

Also history isn’t an exact science and when people fall out about how events and people are depicted it’s often not just checkable facts they’re referring to.

One of the most notoriously inaccurate epics is that Oscar-winning paean to Scottish nationalism, Braveheart. The film cheekily suggests its hero, William Wallace, may have secretly fathered the future English royal line, though his princess “lover” hadn’t even arrived in England by the time of Wallace’s death. His habit of dressing in kilt and blue paint for battle suggests a Pictish warrior of 1,000 years earlier, according to one historian.

But my biggest objection to the film is its depiction of Robert the Bruce as a spineless wimp who needed Wallace to give him moral courage. I have no evidence to prove what the Bruce was like; I just find it difficult to believe the victor of Bannockburn can have been such a wet blanket. That’s one example of opinion complicating matters.

It can be just as tricky even when you’re dealing with events within living memory. The Oscar-winning 1970 movie Patton: Lust For Glory, a biopic of American Second World War general George Patton, was made less than 30 years after the events it depicted and boasted as a consultant none other than retired American general Omar Bradley, who served as both Patton’s subordinate and boss during the war. What better guarantee of accuracy, you might say. Except Bradley loathed Patton and British contemporary Bernard Montgomery and, strangely enough, Bradley emerges from the movie as the sensible general who concentrates on fighting the Nazis while Patton and Monty are depicted as bickering prima donnas more interested in outshining each other than winning the war.

My point is that history is a bit of a minefield – as I suspect we may soon discover, and not just on Oscars night.

A couple I know who belong to a North Yorkshire peace group have told me it’s already met to discuss concerns about next year’s centenary of the start of the First World War, fearing it may become a celebration of the conflict.

I find it difficult to believe that could happen, but few episodes in our history are so surrounded by myths and preconceptions as the “Great War”, and I suspect any attempt to dispel the Blackadder view of events will be met with anger from those worried it’s an attempt to “rewrite history” in a way they don’t like.

Still, if it gets people interested in their own history, as opposed to the Hollywood version, then maybe that really would be a good thing.