Aidan Smith's TV week: Industry (BBC1), Inside Man (BBC1), Karen Pirie (ITV)

Financial traders, possibly acting on insider information about the contents of “Kami-Kwasi” Kwarteng’s mini-budget, have been making small fortunes by betting against the pound. City watchdogs are being urged to investigate and I think I know where the probe should start.
Marisa Abela in IndustryMarisa Abela in Industry
Marisa Abela in Industry

The Pierpoint & Co investment bank, the eighth floor, as featured in Industry (BBC1). These guys - and gals, maybe especially the gals - would sell their souls, their grannies, everything to get ahead. Here’s a typical greeting, one young mammon-worshipper to another: “I think about you less than I think about climate change.”

For the second series, writers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have again drawn on their previous lives in finance and insist the storylines are not sensationalised. Certainly, with the Liz Truss government’s critics being accused this week of “clown show” economics, the timing of the series’ return could not be better.

So a big welcome back to Yasmin (Marisa Abela), the international posho threesomes instigator who last time round forsook her gormless boyfriend - Dylan from The Magic Roundabout, basically - for fellow trading-floor newbie, working-class Robert (Harry Lawtrey), his cocksureness crumbling in the face of the femme fatale’s kinky dares.

David Tennant in Inside ManDavid Tennant in Inside Man
David Tennant in Inside Man

This time Robert is trying to stay sober and Harper (Myha’la Herrold) is never out of the pool but Yasmin is still popping pills and snorting lines and shagging clients on school nights. Harper is never out of the pool because she’s never in the office, the last WFM holdout. Eventually she returns. “Welcome back,” says Yasmin, exiting the loos. “Bitch,” mutters Harper to which the riposte, also out of earshot, is “c***”. The c-word is actually uttered four times, which must be a BBC record.

These are uncertain times in the London branch. Either it “subsumes” New York or the other way around. Remember in The Office when David Brent in Slough and the smoothie from Swindon competed to be Wernham Hogg’s No 1 paper tiger? This will be more vicious, I reckon, with the just-arrived American emissary telling the Brits: “I’ve got bullying and harassment training all day - hopefully I’ll pick up some tips.”

The US wants to “juniorise” our fine and noble - sorry, immoral and hedonistic - traders. I know, I know. How can this show be hideous and hypnotic? It just is. “I don’t like any of the characters,” complains my wife, entirely reasonably, but David Attenborough shows us the ripping of flesh in hierarchical food-chain supremacy battles. For balance and rounded perspectives we watch those and this is all that’s happening in Industry. Personally, I don’t tune in for the wild sex; it’s the scripts I love. Here referencing Dostoevsky and a few minutes later Gary Glitter, they juniorise most other dramas.

Not Inside Man (BBC1), though. The new one from Paisley-born Steven Moffat is different, tricksy, mad and gripping, all of which must have appealed to the actors.

Lauren Lyle as Karen PirieLauren Lyle as Karen Pirie
Lauren Lyle as Karen Pirie

The last time you probably saw Stanley Tucci he was on a food tour of Italy, munching arancini in Sicily. Here he’s stuck with porridge as Jefferson Grieff, a criminologist languishing on a US jail’s death row who wants to “do good” for the time he has left so as penance for his murder offers to unlock mysteries as baffling as the Rubik’s Cube - such as why a senator would have $253.55 paid into his bank account every time he has sex with his wife.

The last time you might have seen David Tennant he was playing himself, an actor stuck at home during lockdown Zooming his fellow marooned thesp, Michael Sheen. Here he’s a vicar, which on the surface makes him good but very quickly he turns bad. Tennant has been bad before but not like the Rev Harry Watling who assaults his teenage son’s maths tutor then locks her in the vicarage’s basement.

He doesn’t mean any of this, things get out of hand, although as Grieff remarks from his cell: “Everyone’s a murderer - you just have to meet the right person.” Normally the sequence of events leading to the incarceration of Dolly Wells’ teacher would have me shouting: “This is ridiculous! Is there anything on another channel which doesn’t involve baking, dancing or Harry Kane?”

But this is Moffat weaving one of his Paisley patterns. His plots are like high-wire plate-spinning. Inside Man opens with some particularly impressive crockery rotation which brings the tutor into contact with an investigative journalist. I’m not sure where it’s all going but I’m prepared to believe Tucci’s baldy-heided, remotely-operating sleuth who says: “Everything makes sense if you think long enough about it. Have a little faith.”

And now for something completely conventional. Well, up to a point. Karen Pirie (ITV) does not take us on a flight of fancy but it does take us to St Andrews. And the eponymous crimebusting heroine, played by Lauren Lyle, is sassy, sparky and in her Doc Martens doesn’t take kindly to mansplaining, sexism or being made to feel like the token wee lassie.

I love St Andrews. Topping & Co for books, Cromers for fish and chips and Gothic locations for grisly whodunnits. You wonder why more filming isn’t done there, although maybe this cold case of a murdered barmaid will be making local tourism chiefs edgy.

The Fife constabulary are edgy enough about the optics to put a woman in charge. PR exercise? Pirie, the creation of Val McDermid, is having none of that, or her newly-acquired sidekick’s smartassery. He answers to Mint because his name’s Murray (come on, keep up).