Sophia Money-Coutts Modern Manners

The eye-popping BBC drama ‘Industry’ has made me more grateful than ever that I didn’t end up in the City

Are you watching on BBC Two? It’s a drama based on a group of young graduates who start work at a City firm called Pierpoint, rumoured to be based on JP Morgan (since Pierpont was the “P” and middle name of the American investment bank’s founder, this isn’t a wholly unfounded rumour). It’s pretty racy in parts, the sort of show you shouldn’t necessarily watch alongside your parents, your children or anyone with a dicky heart. I drew the curtains in my sitting room one evening last week lest any walkers who passed my window assume I was watching porn.

Still, even though I can’t understand a word of the financial jargon, it’s brilliantly written and its main characters reveal themselves to be flawed and complicated humans who elicit sympathy, despite the drinking, the shagging, the drugs and an eye-popping scene in a bathroom at the Christmas party.

It’s also made me more grateful than ever that I didn’t end up in the City having once tried to claw my way in. This was during my final year as a student at LSE. Fellow students were landing extremely lucrative trainee schemes at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers (remember them?). I’d known that I wanted to write since I was 14 but talk around the LSE campus was of milk-round presentations, online application forms and starting salaries. This panicked me: what if I was wrong about wanting to be a writer and I should become a banker instead?

“Forget it, Soph, you’ll be up against guys who’ve been reading

since they were three,” my friend James told me when I informed him of this new career plan in the canteen. I was probably wearing my pink pashmina

Industry The Economist

Flawed characters: David Jonsson, Ben Lloyd-Hughes, Harry Lawtey and (front) Myha’la Herrold in Industry