Konrad Kay and Mickey Down – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.

Konrad Kay and Mickey Down created the hit banking-drama series Industry for HBO and BBC, which has just been confirmed for a second series. Kay and Down both worked in the finance industry after university before leaving  to jointly pursue screen writing careers. The creative pair are also developing a reboot of a classic series with Studio Canal and working on a number of original commissions in the United States.

These are a few of their favourite things… 

Konrad: Watching Liverpool play away from home 

I set my life by Liverpool’s fixtures. I’m not sure it’s any more complex than the fact that football’s rhythms give you something to look forward to.  I especially like watching them away from home. The experience is more concentrated somehow; the singing is louder and everything is sharper, harder, more feral. You’re in a pocket. You’re in “the end.” You’re under siege. You’re really living. The best thing is when one part of the end is chanting, and the other section lags behind, out of sync. Then on the first line of the chorus you fall into perfect time and the line is clean and clear. You belt it out. Your scalp tightens and tingles and it feels like your feet leave the ground. Then when you score it’s bedlam and some baldy Scouse stranger has fallen forward three rows – “gerrrrinlaaaad” –  just so he can kiss your face with ecstasy and you realise again, for the tenth time in an hour: the point of this whole stupid enterprise is joy. There is something holy about it, which sounds stupid to the uninitiated, but those who are reading this and know won’t disagree. It is my favourite place to be alive.

Mickey: Le Relais De Venise L’Entrecote 

The old adage goes that the worst thing about being a writer is the inherent isolation married to the job – I say job, but in our case it’s more an entertainment which happens to fund a lifestyle. Being able to share this with a best friend is a huge privilege and pleasure but it does rob me of an experience I imagine I would have more often if our work wasn’t a duet. For me going to a restaurant by  myself is one of the great underrated joys of adulthood –  and in particular when it’s my favorite restaurant in London – Le Relais De Venise L’Entrecote (always lovingly referred to as simply “Entrecote” by those privileged enough to be in the know.) The menu is both simple (there isn’t one) and collectivist (everyone gets the same thing) – a meal of walnut salad followed by two servings of steak-frites bathed in the bristo’s secret green sauce, which I must confess I have tried to copy and as of yet failed to perfect. The feeling of being the first person in the restaurant, sitting at the table closest to the window, ordering both a beer and a glass of wine, plugging myself into the radio, a podcast or (very occasionally) a book and gorging myself on the simplest yet best meal in London is just an experience I’ve yet to match (disclaimer – I am both married and a father).

Konrad: Longform essays

Essays are ideal for a reader like me as you can find them, save them onto an app like Pocket, pat yourself on the back for curating a Twitter feed that spits this high quality content out for you, then ignore them forever.  This form of writing is also great for the inherently lazy as it’s far less of an undertaking than starting a novel and the best exponents of it manage to sort of compress the prose to the point where it soars like poetry in the final paragraphs. It can have that same distilled quality. The best examples take esoteric subjects and find humanity or divinity in them. David Grann writing about squid hunting, John Jeremiah Sullivan writing about a Christian Rock Festival, David Foster Wallace turning a soulless sports autobiography into a meditation on why we feel a need to be close to sports stars (they’re gods on earth). I feel like reading these pieces is sort of cheating, in terms of the ratio of the time you invest vs. how much you get out of them. In case I come across all “your boyfriend in the pub,” on those choices, I also like Joan Didion, Leslie Jamison, Zadie Smith, Lisa Taddeo. Michael Paterniti is really great. Now I’m just naming writers. Start with Tom Junod’s profile of Tony Curtis in GQ from 1996, wait for it to soar.

Mickey: Howard Stern 

It feels odd to publicly endorse Howard Stern – a controversial yet brilliant figure – as one of my favourite things in the entire world but it would be doing a disservice to the legacy he has left on my adult life to leave him off this short list. I could go on at length about Howard’s contribution to entertainment, how he has defined his genre for the entirety of this 40 year career, how he achieved things on TV and on Radio which people had never achieved, how all great entertainers of a certain ilk are standing on his shoulders….but I think i’ll be a bit more more personal – I started listening to Howard when I was in the midst of my job in banking, just on the cusp of the realisation that I was in the wrong career. Mine was a job that required me to be in the office 80% of the time I was awake and it was only covertly listening to Howard that got me through those darkest of days. Since then he (much to the chagrin of my wife) has become an ever present, ever audible voice in our household and I am not embarrassed to say that I cannot go to the loo, take a shower, take a flight, do a car journey or even go to sleep without Howard’s unexpectedly soothing voice in my ear.

Mickey & Konrad: Pubs 

There’s probably lots of great writing about pubs as some sort of metaphor for nationhood, or their decline as an emblem of a country falling out of touch with its past or whatever. Suffice to say they all closed this year and we all suffered. We were surprised by how much we suffered, but it’s not that surprising when you consider this country is a world leader in recognising the genuine excellence of alcohol. It’s really good stuff, it transpires. Better in groups. Fine alone, but sadder. In groups: euphoric. A place to congregate with like minded people to drink it – a very good idea. Here are some of our favourites: The Eagle (Farringdon), The Canton Arms (South Lambeth), The Camberwell Arms (Camberwell), The Anchor and Hope (Southwark), The Nag’s Head (Belgravia), The Grenadier (Belgravia), Spaniards Inn (Highgate), The Lansdowne (Primrose Hill), The Wells Tavern (Hampstead), The Albion (Islington).  Get in them when you can and drink them dry.