The bonking ballbusters from the banking drama Industry (BBC1) are back for a fourth series, following the carnage of the last run and with the stretchers having long since carted off various victims after the fall of banking giant Pierpoint.

Remember the shock murder committed by a loan shark (somewhat incongruously played by the Chabuddy G actor Asim Chaudhry) and Yasmin’s cruel jilting of poor Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey), one of the few likeable characters? Series four plays similar tunes but in an even more manic key.

Sir Henry Muck, Kit Harington’s depressive blue blood with the Peter Sutcliffe beard, is still on the scene after a breakdown prompted by a failed tilt at parliament and is attempting to convince the world (and the viewers) that he is more than just a damaged posh boy. His wife, Marisa Abela’s Yasmin, now Lady Muck (quite the joke name, that), is chatelaine of his stately home and has her eyes on more financial prizes even though her marriage is in trouble. She’s fluttering around cabinet ministers — there’s one old Pierpoint fave in government — and a man called Whitney Halberstram, a gimlet-eyed predator who runs a fintech outfit called Tender and is played with devilish precision by Max Minghella. Harper (Myha’la) has fresh plans that skirt the fringes of legality and there’s the promise of more navel-gazing scenes with Eric (Ken Leung), her mentor, frenemy and father figure, when he returns in later episodes to talk about his id and her troubled childhood between deals.

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The writers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay don’t seem interested in creating people you like or necessarily believe in, and yet you do want to find out what happens to them. Over the course of the eight episodes (many devoted to a single storyline) there is an undeniable energy to the propulsive plotting, helped along by the poppy incidental music.

I’ll take all the financial jargon on trust, as well as the way characters whizz around the world at high speed, turn up on people’s doorsteps unannounced (you assume they know what phones are), don’t seem to have hangovers and manage to break off from the bonking and bank talk with reams of psychologising. These are finance folk who talk to you as if they have spent 45 years practising clinical psychology.

My main problem with the new run, though, isn’t that there are many moments of sheer implausibility but that we have seen it all before. A new adventure for Muck, more shorting shenanigans from Harper, violence, corruption, regulatory issues in government and, of course, lots of sex. There is perhaps even more in this run than the last; the intimacy co-ordinators must have been kept busy. This certainly pushes at the boundaries for BBC1. But like the show, it leaves you with a slightly empty feeling. You feel this is a drama that has slightly run out of steam and ideas.

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The way Kay and Down have used their own banking experience to collate all the most outlandish stories and gossip and cram them into the lives of their characters may be a reason for the show’s success but is also a failing. They continue to filch stories from the news cycle (later sequences carry a whiff of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell) in a way that seems designed to feel relevant yet often comes across as shoehorning in a climax to a dazzling firework display.

And once the pyrotechnics stop what are you left with? A sense of having a fun time but with quite a lot of rubbish too.
★★☆☆☆
Industry is on BBC1 on January 12 at 10.40pm

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