It has been nearly two years since Gary Oldman won an Oscar for his performance in Darkest Hour. As one of the few working-class British actors making a living in Hollywood, Oldman’s portrayal of Winston Churchill – an eccentric English aristocrat – was worthy of the praise it received. However, it should not be forgotten that the film contained a number of historical fabrications and uncritically glorified a man who, if alive today, would almost certainly be reviled for his racist views. Nonetheless, the film was met with international acclaim, with reports of standing ovations in cinemas and an outpouring of Churchill-worship across the media. As film critic Mark Kermode said, Darkest Hour is the film that Britons are “not allowed to dislike” for fear of seeming unpatriotic.

But let’s be clear: Darkest Hour was pure Oscar-bait. Calculated to appeal to sophisticated filmgoers, it followed a tested industry formula: produce a heroic depiction of a “great Briton” played by a beloved (usually posh) British actor, set in a romanticised old England, and watch the awards roll in. Nowadays all it seems an actor must do to warrant an Oscar nomination is portray a supposedly “great Briton” – think Judi Dench (Mrs Brown), Helen Mirren (The Queen), Colin Firth (The King’s Speech), and Olivia Colman (The Favourite).

Aside from making elites feel good about themselves, the British public laps these films up. They seem to reflect what the academic Paul Gilroy termed “postcolonial melancholia”. Or, as Salman Rushdie wrote, the “refurbishment of the empire’s tarnished image”. Rushdie argued that “the continuing decline, the growing poverty and the meanness of spirit of much of Thatcherite Britain encourages many Britons to turn their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence”.

How relevant such observations seem today. After decades of neoliberalism, crippling austerity and a string of calamitous foreign military interventions, a wave of nostalgic television shows has emerged: Downton Abbey, Victoria, The Crown, along with the films mentioned above.

As for the political landscape, it is well understood that Brexit is a project imbued with imperial nostalgia. The rightwing leave narrative used the evocative language of “making Britain great again”, “taking back control”, and Britain assuming its “rightful place in the world”.

With this in mind, it’s easy to see the appeal of politicians such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, the former having been described as a “relic of a bygone era”, while the latter’s “colonial mentality” and “wistfulness for empire” has, as writer Sisonke Msimang put it, always been in keeping with “Britain’s historical view of itself”.

There is little doubt this nostalgia has helped foster a sense of nationalistic pride that is favourable to a Brexit agenda. As the Guardian’s Ian Jack wrote, even if they weren’t meant to, films such as Dunkirk and Darkest Hour serve to “fuel Brexit fantasies” by resurrecting a “mythical past [to] serve present and future political needs”.

More broadly, such films also serve as propaganda for the state and its elites. This is clear from the narratives of history they present, which are nearly always favourable to establishment interests. They are histories from above, rather than below.

Cultural theorists and film scholars have written of the ideological role that such “heritage films” play in helping to mythologise a version of Englishness, notably that of the white, upper-middle classes. Their depictions of what is deemed to be “quintessentially English” help to reaffirm a sense of national identity among an otherwise diverse, disparate and divided population.

But it’s not just domestic audiences they influence: these narratives are also sold internationally to help reinforce a particular image of Britain abroad. They are regarded as “soft power” assets that help Britain achieve its goals around the world.

In 2013 the director general of the BBC, Tony Hall, suggested that the “silent diplomacy” of shows such as Downton Abbey could be just as valuable as the British army. In the same year the House of Lords even set up a select committee to examine the advantages of soft power. The committee’s report encouraged the promotion of what it called a “strategic narrative” – “a story that a country tells itself and others about its identity”. Such narratives, one professor advised the committee, “may be strategically deployed [to] construct a shared meaning of the past, present and future […] in order to shape the behaviour of other actors”.

What is evident is that our politicians clearly understand the propaganda power of British film and television. The problem, however, is that the most successful films and shows present a distorted image of the country.

As the writer and second world war veteran Harry Leslie Smith once observed, these productions depict history as a “pageant in which the wealthy, the entitled and the nobility oversee the lives of millions with benevolence, wisdom and grace”. The rest of us are mere “background scenery”.

As The Crown returns to Netflix this weekend, this is worth remembering, because at a time when Britain is so divided, and our distrust of elites so widespread, we need our filmmakers to tell the stories of our collective past from the perspective of ordinary people, not an elite few.

• Callum Alexander Scott is a PhD researcher