Bankers and other assorted finance bros are an inescapable presence on the London nightlife scene. Industry, the British-made TV drama that follows a group of graduates on (and off) a City trading floor, begins its second series on BBC1 tonight and spares no detail of the drug-fuelled hedonism of its young bankers. One plot arc in the first series starts when the protagonist, exhausted after a long night on the powder, executes a trade in the wrong currency.
Some in the field have protested that the on-screen excess is unrealistic. But much of it is apparently inspired by real-world experience. Mickey Down, one of Industry’s creators, spent just over a year working at Rothschild at the beginning of the 2010s. Among his peers, working hard and playing hard was taken to extremes: ‘It’s not natural to do a 100-hour work week, but somehow your body acclimatises to it,’ he says. Those long days in the office turned into long weekends (often starting on a Thursday) of partying at high-end clubs such as Cuckoo in Mayfair, where bankers would spend thousands on bottles of Dom Perignon with sparklers strapped to them.
Aside from among the straight-laced eastern Europeans, cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine use was rife, Down says. Italians, Germans and the French were finally able ‘to let their hair down’ after the rigours of business school, while ‘Swedes’ – and Down concedes this is a slight generalisation – would ‘take lots of coke’. But it was the British who held the ‘gold medal’ in drug use, having gone through a three-year intensive training programme as undergraduates.
The same antics still occur a decade later. But what has changed is that more and more bankers are shirking expensive bottle-service clubs for those which can be considered ‘cool’ – venues such as Fabric, Fold and Oval Space, many nestled in the half-gentrified warehouse districts of east London.
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