Lazy Polish stereotypes are spoiling British films

Netflix’s film of The Thursday Murder Club has all the makings of a British export hit: a cosy crime plot, a cast of national treasures, a backdrop steeped in English eccentricity. And then comes Bogdan Jankowski, a Polish labourer with a confiscated passport – a character who could have been lifted straight from a tabloid cartoon.

The Pole has too often been cast as brute, victim or buffoon

It is hardly a new trope. Since the post-war years, the Pole has too often been cast as brute, victim or buffoon. Tennessee Williams’s Stanley Kowalski set the mould in A Streetcar Named Desire : sweaty, violent, his foreignness exaggerated for the audience’s unease. British culture has not resisted the temptation. Guy Ritchie presented Polish heavies in RocknRolla . Peep Show turned th