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 in the seventies and eighties all the villains were either Russian or Irish on British TV. I think the answer, sadly, is not watch those shows, even if they're well written and interesting (I don't by default, barely watch TV at all)
@Lexialex People are always looking for enemies. Fear sells and TV and cinema, specially commercial one knows that. In the past there were the Nazis, the communists, both Russians and Asian, then you had the IRA, the Islamic. We look at mainstream TV and is all the same the stories are the same. No added value. They just change the object of fear and put a different context. TV feeds from people anxieties and if TV in the UK reflects that, means it sells. TV does no public service
@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.
spoilers for Line of Duty Show more
@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.
@kevinmarks oh that’s right. I remember the plot I didn’t remember they were Muslims
@Lexialex Sorry for disturbing you, but now as the end of the Collateral has been broadcasted, if you finish watching all the episodes, it is not a story about Muslim terrorists at all. It is a more complicated story. And if you may excuse my spoiler, the bad boss actually turned out to be a white guy. It is an interesting show, not that stereotype:-)
@Lexialex I'd apologise for the UK but I agree with you