What’s up with all these British TV dramas featuring some version of a Muslim terrorist plot? McMafia is about Russians, still features Muslim terrorists. Next of Kin (oh dear, oh dear) I was really excited about Collateral....but guess what? Oh yes. This time they’re Syrians. UK...get your people
@Lexialex Try Line of Duty - see what they do with the trope in the 1st episode.
@kevinmarks I watched it. All seasons. Can’t remember this part though. But it’s been a while.
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@Lexialex the odd thing for me (while in the US) was seeing the rise of Russians and other eastern europeans as villains in UK drama. A new kind of othering that has got more mainstream.
@kevinmarks a return to the 80’s.
@Lexialex in the 80s our terrorists were mainly Irish - the othering of Russians and Poles is a newer phenomenon.
In London in 2008 I had a cab driver give me the "coming over here taking our jobs" speech. Except he was talking about "the Poles", and he was of West Indian descent. That was the most confusing assimilation I'd seen.
@kevinmarks good point. I just remember Hollywood movies shifting from having German bad guys to Russians. Frankly I didn’t mind the German bad guys. We should have stuck with that for a bit longer. (Never saw a Polish bad guy. How do you even write that, every Polish person I’ve met is sweet as can be and although Poland is being dodgy about history right now, they didn’t start the war)
@Lexialex I caught "the Foreigner" on Netflix recently, which was Jackie Chan in London battling IRA terrorists, led by a very Gerry Adams-like Piers Brosnan. (Apparently it was a 1992 novel, but they made the political framework plausible).
It is more often Russian bad guys, but a lot of the new racism against the Polish here is because they have jobs in food serve and construction etc - the places you'd see signage in Spanish in the US are in Polish in the UK now.
