‘The first time we see Shia LaBeouf’s character he’s riding a Harley-Davidson – just like Marlon Brando in The Wild One.” So said a million reviews of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Except, in The Wild One, Brando rode a Triumph. This casual inaccuracy, allegedly started by a comment by Steven Spielberg, the most powerful film director in the world, caused me to hurl a biking boot at the Bang & Olufsen television (I missed, thank God). All right, so I admit it’s an easy mistake to make, but it’s one that happens far too often.

Forget Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot; if you want a radical reinvention of history, you need look no further than Hollywood. Take Cary Grant. Well, you may as well, because the Americans already have. I have never met an American who didn’t think that the bloke known as Archibald Leach in Bristol was a Septic. What’s worse is when Hollywood misleads us about the actions of British servicemen and women who risked and often lost their lives.

In the film U-571, an American submarine torpedoes a U-boat and captures an Enigma cipher machine that helps the allies win the war. Two things are wrong with this movie. First, an Enigma machine was taken from a U-boat as early as May 1941, which, need I point out, was before the US joined the war. Second, it was HMS Bulldog, a British warship, that captured it. Worse still is the news that Tom Cruise is near to finishing The Few, a second world war movie based on the life of the glamorous, wealthy and talented, Brooklyn-born Billy Fiske.

He raced cars, raised hell and was clever enough to get accepted by Cambridge University. When war broke out he volunteered immediately for the RAF but – and it’s a big “but” – here’s where things don’t go quite the way the studios would have wanted.

According to history, Fiske’s Hurricane fighter caught fire just a few weeks into the battle of Britain and he died the next day from his injuries. There is no record of him shooting down enemy aircraft. Of course there’s more chance of Robert Mugabe opening the bowling for Zimbabwe against England at the Oval than this fact being accurately represented in the film. Billy Fiske will – in all likelihood – be transformed into a barrel-rolling fighter ace, soaring through the blue Kent skies, sending swarms of the Luftwaffe’s finest to a fiery end. And bedding some initially uptight but subsequently insatiable posh totty.

What’s massively irritating is that the Americans don’t need to bend the truth. Billy Fiske was a genuine hero. It doesn’t matter that he was killed when he was; what matters is that he had the courage to volunteer when he did. Why not tell it like it was? And if that doesn’t play well with 17-year-old mullet-headed boys in Poughkeepsie, then why not make the whole thing up? You know, fiction. Pretend. Just one thing, though. If they make a Happy Days movie and change the Fonz’s Triumph Bonneville to a Harley, I might have to think seriously about, er, not going to see it.

Steve Berry is a former Top Gear presenter and a regular pundit on Radio 5 Live