Sex, drugs and Bloomberg terminals: How Industry highlights the ‘crony chumocracy’ of Tory rule

If you can bear to look beyond the corporate glamour, hubris, bikinis, raw ambition, coke and blowjobs, Industry is actually a very serious TV programme.

“It’s really become about class, and about money and privilege and the intersection of all these things,” says the show’s co-creator, Konrad Kay. His co-collaborator, Mickey Down, chips in: “It is a reflection of the government and the society we’ve had for the last 14 years. That avaricious, crony chumocracy we’ve been living under.”

Industry sees Down and Kay’s graduate bankers work, shag and snort their way into their careers at a cut-throat London bank. Financial jargon and mucky moral decisions ensue. Characters shout over the bustle of the trading floor, staking livelihoods on big bets made with the densest language. In the show’s very first episode, a graduate trainee dies at work.

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Now returning for its third series, Industry might seem a classic case of ‘write what you know’: both studied at Oxford, then went and worked in finance almost by default. Kay did a stint on Morgan Stanley’s trading floor, Down in investment banking for Rothschild, before both sacked it off for writing.

“I went in there thinking the world owed me a living and that I was going to be really good at this thing,” says Kay. “I had my nice Morgan Stanley gym bag, and everyone was going to fuck me and be my friend. None of those things transpired, and I ended up losing quite a lot of internal confidence and self-belief and stuff that, honestly, I re-found through my relationship with Mickey.”

As well as showing on the BBC, Industry has been given the coveted Sunday night HBO slot in the US – a mark of status afforded to The Sopranos, Succession and The Last of Us. It has proved a petri dish for its young stars. Marisa Abela (Amy Winehouse in Back to Black), David Jonsson (Rye Lane, Alien: Romulus), and Myha’la (Bodies Bodies Bodies) have made the move to the big screen since the series first aired in 2020.

For its third season, alongside a plot looking at capitalism’s attempts to go ‘green’, Industry tackles the stakes of the class dynamic in the UK. These stakes are existential for the characters, says Down. “There are some people who are just there to pick up the pieces when people who have been afforded a great deal of privilege fuck up,” he says.

“What it has grown into, really, is about the pursuit of ambition in a world where there’s no currency to being vulnerable or having empathy for others. And whether those two things can ever come together. Can you ever find a marriage of those two things in this world?”

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The country has just rejected one of the banking industry’s own: a young, hyper-ambitious Goldman Sachs alumni by the name of Rishi Sunak. Yet when most people think about who runs the country, they rarely pay much attention to finance, say the pair.

“The public really underestimate how in thrall and how powerless politicians are in the face of the City,” says Kay.

“Liz Truss was brought down in some part by the invisible hand of the market,” says Down. “It is what it is, it’s a system of power which is not going to change, and politicians think otherwise at their peril, because it’s still as powerful as it ever was.”

In particular, they’ve been struck by the reaction to a scene in episode five showing the chummy quid- pro-quo between politicians, the media, and financiers – with some slating it for portraying an exaggerated “illuminati”.

“That betrays a naivety on their part on how politics really works in this country – honestly – especially under the last five years of this Tory government and the sense it really was trying to eat its own tail,” says Kay. The small number of people with genuine power, he adds, “would really actually freak people out if they knew the true extent.”

“Anyone that’s spent time at The Spectator summer party, or been to members’ clubs in Mayfair, will know it is a pretty realistic depiction of how some government is done,” says Down. Kay chips in: “That doesn’t just waltz out the door when Keir Starmer’s Labour government comes into Downing Street either.”

Will treasury yields hit 4%? Is the world pregnant with tail risk? Has young Harper Stern done a good thing by selling her client half a yard of options at four cents? More to the point: how are you meant to know what any of that means without an economics degree? 

Down admits that, at first, it was just technobabble and filler. “We need Harper to do a really cool trade to show that she’s knowledgeable and competent”, was the idea, and they would write a trade which had no bearing on the plot. By season two, they struck on an idea: “What if we actually make the finance and business story part of the plot? Genius. And what we did was make them way too dense and unintelligible,” Down adds. By season three, he says, they’ve found a balance.

Kay reckons there’s something else behind the “jargon” complaints. 

“I think there are a lot of people who say they don’t understand the show who aren’t actually listening to it,” he says. “They’re either staring at their phones – I’m actually convinced a lot of people don’t listen to the dialogue in the show, or they don’t try to understand it.”

Asking viewers to pay attention to your TV show is an increasingly big ask. Show runners are reportedly told their shows aren’t “second screen enough” – in other words, that TV needs to be written for a viewer to follow while idly scrolling through their phone. Industry is not this.

“Netflix have made a huge business out of stuff you don’t really have to pay attention to, and that’s fine. Some people don’t want to engage in TV like that. But we want our stuff to be slightly more literate, because it’s a huge investment of our time. We’re never going to get these years back,” says Kay. A single series takes up their whole lives for two years, he adds.

“It’s an endeavour that takes such a long time, and so many people coming together, that to not push ourselves to say something with it – for it to be really entertaining, for it to be more than just Valium for your brain while you cook dinner or something – neither of us really want to make stuff like that.”

So Industry is the product of that, and it falls to two Oxbridge ex-City boys to bring us the truth about the bankers and the bonuses. Like a toddler smothering peas in ketchup, at least they have the courtesy to dress it up in something fun. “We’ve only had this government for the last six months or something, so who knows if we slide back into the corruption. I don’t know. I hope we do because it means we have something to write about in season four,” Down says. “That’s a joke by the way.”

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Industry returns to BBC One on 1 October and is available on iPlayer. 

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