During the Cold War I am fairly certain that films, TV dramas and other popular entertainment did not remain silent on the threat posed by the Soviets. In fact my memory from those times was that popular culture was filled with Russian baddies, drunken homosexualist double–agents and great western super-heroes who were intent on taking down the commie threat.

As cineastes know, this culminated in David Zucker’s 1988 master-piece The Naked Gun. In the opening scene, Lieutenant Frank Drebin of Police Squad disrupted a meeting in Beirut where an attack on America was being planned by Idi Amin, Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gaddafi, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Our hero duffed up each of them one by one.

Our brave agents are on the trail of a dastardly villain – a white working-class man by the name of Whitlock

Our brave agents are on the trail of a dastardly villain – a white working-class man by the name of Whitlock

Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, movies and TV series still relied on Soviet or post-Soviet villains. When they started to run out of steam, the more butch movie franchises resorted to North Korean villains, which seemed tolerable, and certainly wasn’t in the realm of outright fantasy.

I only mention this because, as I have noted here before, in the era of Islamic terrorism there is nothing that our creative communities want to shy away from more than the main security threat of the day. This isn’t my security estimate, but the estimate of the British security services themselves. Despite Muslims........

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