At first glance, there are few similarities between Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s classic 1945 novel – later adapted into an equally classic ITV series – of prelapsarian bliss in Oxford and Industry, the BBC’s adrenaline-fuelled show that exposes the dark iniquity at the heart of the financial industry. The one is a languid examination of (discreetly portrayed) same-sex love and Catholic guilt, and the other is a profane, sexually charged and palpitation-inducing dive into hedonistic self-indulgence. Brideshead is plover’s eggs and Meursault; Industry class A drugs and group sex. They would seem as distinct from one another as chalk and (Comté) cheese.
Yet the continuing appeal of Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s show, now into its fourth season, is that it has as deep and innate an understanding of British high-end society as Waugh ever did, even if its expression is louder and more vulgar. Down and Kay were (of course) students who met at Oxford, and subsequently hit upon the idea of fictionalising their own experiences in investment banking. Both worked at Morgan Stanley, although that notoriously hard-nosed institution is milquetoast compared to the fiendishly pressurised Pierpoint & Co, the fictitious bank that lies at the dark heart of Industry. The very first episode begins with the death of a young banker who has been popping pills and glugging caffeinated energy drinks in order to keep up with the punishing regime that Pierpoint describes, and it only gets worse from then on.
Industry pays dutiful homage to Oxford, a university that has always had a symbiotic relationship with both power and finance. If you want depressing proof of this, see what happens every Michaelmas term, when recruiters pitch up in the city as part of the so-called ‘milk round’ and offer finalists the Faustian pact of money, prestige – and more morally nefarious activities – in exchange for selling their soul to Big Finance. This was even fictionalised in the second season of the show, when Harry Lawtey’s character Robert, a working-class boy made good, returns to his alma mater to persuade a sought-after finalist to work at Pierpoint.
Robert is friends with David Jonsson’s Gus Sackey, an Old Etonian and Oxford graduate who comes to regard banking as soul-destroying and gets out. We are invited not to sympathise with his principled stand – albeit coming from a place of privilege – but instead to think that he somehow doesn’t have the cojones to cut it when it counts. The show’s more fascinating dynamic concerns the two alpha females that lie at its heart, Myha’la’s initially callow, quickly ferociously ambitious American transplant Harper and Marisa Abela’s powerful and sexually aggressive Yasmin, whose own well-heeled background is gradually shown to be little more than smoke and mirrors, barely masking the little girl lost who covers her innate insecurity with power-play romances and, of course, drugs – lots of drugs.
Industry is the natural rejection of the veneration for all things traditional and English that Brideshead epitomised
So many illegal substances are ingested over the course of Industry that it starts to make Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort, the debauched banker at the heart of The Wolf of Wall Street, look like a Boy Scout. Yet if all the show consisted of was sex and drugs, it would be little more than a ‘look at me, ma!’ exercise in empty provocation, a British version of Euphoria with Oxford graduates. Instead, just as Brideshead gradually shifts from a tolerant, even amused look at moneyed idleness into an anguished examination of love and the personal cost of faith, so Industry has evolved into a coruscating perspective on the contrast between new money – rapaciously worshipped by its protagonists – and old money, zealously guarded by the old-school aristocracy who cannot help be threatened by the buccaneering arrivistes who are ostentatiously unimpressed by stately piles and posh accents – unless, of course, it behoves them to marry into them and thereby save their bacon. Less Brideshead Revisited, then, and more Brideshead Remortgaged.
This is the potential fate that awaits Kit Harington’s Sir Henry Muck – the character names have a Dickensian, or even Hogarthian relish – to them, the CEO of a so-called ‘environmental energy startup’ called Lumi. Muck lives up to his title, in both senses, but when he becomes romantically involved with Yasmin, who he eventually marries – meaning that she, quite literally, becomes Lady Muck – he becomes part of an aspirant power couple that intrigues and shags its way across boardroom and bedroom alike. Certainly, by the latest series of Industry, it is hard to avoid the sense that it has become Dallas or Dynasty with better tailoring and an MA from business school: not, as a great man once said, that there’s anything wrong with that.
If Evelyn Waugh could be raised from the dead and put in front of a television set to be shown what his distant descendants have come up with, he would probably harrumph and mutter something about how disgusting it all is. He would not be wrong. Yet if Waugh’s initial disdain for the show could be overcome, he would surely see that Industry is the natural rejection of the veneration for all things traditional and English that Brideshead epitomised. In that book’s case, it was Catholicism that led to ‘the twitch upon the thread’, whereas in the later show, it is money, filthy and horribly desirable, that lies at the heart of the moral decay all its characters are plunged headlong into.
Will it end well for any of them? I doubt it, but that’s why it’s so disgustingly watchable. ‘I had been there before; I knew all about it’, Waugh’s protagonist Charles Ryder muses when he, quite literally, revisits Brideshead. Those revisiting the world of banking know all about it, too, and plunge headlong into debauchery, immersing themselves in the gutter while the stars twinkle sadly a long, long way away.
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