Did Hollywood pave the way for Barack Obama? Dennis Haysbert, who played a black president, David Palmer, in the hit TV series 24, believes so. “My role helped prepare the way for Obama, opening the eyes of the American people [so] that they felt they could vote for a black president without triggering the apocalypse,” he said earlier this year.

Cynics might point out that whenever Hollywood casts a black president, threats of disaster are usually part of the plot. In 1997’s The Fifth Element, Tommy Lister battled a demonic force from space and in 1998’s Deep Impact, Morgan Freeman strove to divert an asteroid heading for Earth.

Nevertheless, cultural analysts agree that Haysbert has a point: the entertainment industry made the election of a real-life black president at least thinkable. Todd Boyd, who lectures on black cinema at the University of Southern California, said actors such as Haysbert, who played a coolly charismatic president across five seasons of 24, “may have made such trends in society less troubling for some”.

Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University in New York, believes that while Obama has risen on his own talent, Hollywood has played a bit part in shaping public attitudes.

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“Fiction, whether in books such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which highlighted the horrors of slavery on the eve of the American civil war, or a TV drama like 24, often prompts society to adjust to changes before they take place in real life. It takes the threatening edge off,” Thompson said.

Hollywood’s portrayal of black presidents really took off during the 1970s, when the actor James Earl Jones was cast in a film called The Man. Jones played a senator who becomes president – but only after a building falls on the white president and his coterie.

The paranoid posters for the film read: “The first black president of the United States. First they swore him in. Then they swore to get him.”

The 1972 comedy was so disturbing that it was not distributed in several Southern states, and is still not available on DVD. Earl Jones went on to become the voice of the Star Wars villain Darth Vader, who many in the Deep South found less threatening.

As recently as 2003, calamity was still seen as the only path to power for a black candidate. In Head of State, a hip-hop-spouting councillor played by the comedian Chris Rock ascends into the White House after planes carrying the president and vice-president crash into each other.

When Rock’s presidency is announced, white suburbanites are seen running from their homes in panic, faces rigid in comic fear.

According to Bill Maher, a television satirist, the difference between Rock and Obama was that Obama was “whiter” and thus less threatening than the average hip-hop-loving white teenager. From a comedian’s point of view, that’s not helpful. “I only hope he [Obama] ‘blacks it up’ a bit in office, gets a little jiggy,” said Maher, “otherwise we comedians who loved George Bush and John McCain are going to be out of a job.” Rather more worrying is that Hollywood still punishes its black high-achievers. In the fifth series of 24, Haysbert’s retired politician is shot by a sniper. And in the last series his equally black brother, who took over the presidency, is blown up.

“I was very upset by that,” said Haysbert, whose character was recently voted most popular fictional president ever, just ahead of Harrison Ford in Air Force One, in a poll by the Blockbuster video rental chain.

“We live in this country where we have killed off all those beloved leaders, John F Kennedy, RFK, Martin Luther King. Why would you ever want to take a show that has produced such a wonderful dignified character that everyone loves and do that?”

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