📺 Watched Industry.

Here we follow the lives of a group of ambitious and mostly new-to-it investment bankers and traders as they enter the still-brutal banking industry some time after the massive 2008 market crash. Some of it is financial drama, something I find myself strangely attracted to despite the cruel destruction the real thing has overall wreaked upon the world. A lot of it is lifestyle drama - sex, drugs, maybe some rock ‘n’ roll.

There are no heroes here. The first series really starts off with a young lady who has lied her way into getting a job in the first place. The ethics don’t really improve from there as everyone lives or dies - mostly metaphorically - by whether they can make more money for their employer than their peers.

As the seasons move on, the plot felt like it focused on the day-to-day work life of these under-pressure yet unfathomably rich wannabe bankers and more on the surrounding antics of the players in question. Nonetheless, whilst it’s “entirely” fictional, some of even the bizarre later events I believe are echos of what we know to have happened in the real world. For example, the meeting of a bunch of the very wealthy and very racist multi-millionaires for a lovely dinner? It’s hard not to see this as a direct parallel to, for instance, Peter Thiel’s various dinner parties involving the rich and influential ruiners of today’s world.

In fact, as I often think with these “fictional but obviously not entirely so” programs, I wish they’d done a documentary after the fact of which real life events may have inspired which story-lines. I think anyone sensible with less of a compulsive news fixation than myself might have been surprised, as I imagine I would be.

I was somewhat darkly amused to see the Office for National Statistics complained that it unfairly represented their employees in a damaging way. Without spoiling the storyline perhaps they do have a plausible reason to do so, although I’d be surprised if the damage was all that damaging.

But it has been noted elsewhere that perhaps the banking industry might have more cause for complaint:

Simon French, the chief economist at the investment bank Panmure Liberum, said: “If that is Darren’s major issue with Industry, he has been focusing on the wrong bits … Can I write a letter saying that City workers are worried that BBC is portraying us all as sex-mad, drug-peddling sociopaths?”

That said, the stories a friend of mine who worked in the investment banking industry once told me might suggest that there really is little that could be really be described as libellous there.