A new TV drama about bankers gave me flashbacks to my own short-lived City career. In this environment, there is no time to question what you are doing – you are just always racing to keep up
Want to watch a bunch of unlikable people do whatever it takes for money and power? Well, you could turn on the evening news or, to mix things up a bit, you could watch Industry, a new HBO/BBC drama that is generating a lot of buzz. The show follows five graduates as they battle it out to secure a full-time job at Pierpoint & Co, a fictional London bank, in the wake of the 2008 crash. It is a heady mixture of cocaine, commodities and cut-throat competition.
In a world where tech workers have largely replaced investment bankers as the malevolent masters of the universe, Industry feels very retro. It certainly transported me back to the past, bringing back nightmarish memories of my life as a graduate trainee at a corporate law firm in the City during the financial crisis. I studied English literature at university and had harboured the usual vague ambitions of working in something artsy and worthy. Unfortunately, there aren’t really any graduate schemes for jobs like that. Panicking about unemployment, I got a training contract at a big law firm. It paid for a law conversion course, gave a grant for living expenses and offered a generous salary. Why wouldn’t you take it?