The Spectator has an article by Alexander Larman in which he compares the current BBC drama series Industry to Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Given the contents of Industry, which follows the careers of several young characters working at a London investment bank, this seems something of a stretch. As it turns out, it is the satire and not the story that Larman finds comparable. This is suggested in the title: “Is ‘Industry’ the ‘Brideshead Revisited’ of our times? The BBC show is as satirical as Evelyn Waugh.” Here’s the opening paragraph:
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…
Larman then proceeds to state his case for the similarities between the two satirical presentations. This is well worth reading and makes his case for similarity very well. It concludes with this:
…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.
The complete article is available here. Episode 5 of Series 4 is broadcast today on BBC One and will be available (along with all episodes of this and previous series) on BBC iPlayer thereafter. It is also available in North America on HBO.
