'Good’s never going to triumph’: the makers of BBC show Industry on bad bankers

Finance in screen fiction is a realm of monsters. From Gordon Gekko in Wall Street and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho to the crazed party animals of The Wolf of Wall Street, the arena of deal-making is portrayed – particularly in America – as winner-take-all without trace of empathy or redemption.

Industry – the British-made television drama that follows a group of young bankers competing on a City trading floor whose second series airs on BBC1 later this month – is a more subtle example of the genre. Its characters are not monstrous but they are all flawed, ruthlessly transactional in their dealings with each other, and frankly hard to like. There aren’t any nice guys.

I took the writers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay to lunch at the Ivy Café in Marylebone and asked them why. Both are (like me) former investment bankers themselves – Down was an intern on a mergers and acquisitions team at Rothschild’s, Kay lasted a bit longer as an equity salesman at Morgan Stanley. Did they hate every second? Is Industry, in effect, the therapist’s couch that’s helping them get over the trauma? I had, after all, been through a similar transition myself and took at least a decade to write the first career out of my system.

Not really, they reply separately, but in similar words. They liked at least some of their colleagues but both suffered a form of imposter syndrome: the balance sheet analysis behind M&A work was ‘a foreign language I didn’t speak’, says Down. ‘I made so many mistakes, I always felt I was about to be found out.’