Kit Harington wears a Rolex Datejust

On his fortieth birthday, in the second episode of Industry's fourth season, Henry Muck comes down to breakfast and his wife Yasmin hands him a present. It is an old Rolex Datejust. He turns it over, reads the initials RM engraved on the caseback, and goes still: the watch belonged to his dead father, Reginald Muck. Yasmin found it in a cabinet and had it serviced, and she has no idea what she has just set on the table. Henry gets up and leaves the room.

Kit Harington plays Muck, the aristocrat and on-and-off tech founder the show keeps trying to humanize. The watch is a 1974 Datejust on a worn leather strap, and the date is the point: by the costume designer Laura Smith's account, the show's creators wanted a Datejust old enough to pass as a real heirloom, and 1974 is the year Reginald turned eighteen and first wore it. A Datejust is assured without being loud, the watch of English families who whisper about money rather than shout it, and the leather strap takes it away from the steel-bracelet version into something clearly handed down.

Reginald killed himself on his own fortieth birthday. Henry spends the episode circling the same date and nearly dying the same way, and the Rolex keeps the count: in one acid-fuelled scene his dead father appears with his throat cut while the sound drops away to the watch ticking on Henry's wrist. The present Yasmin meant as a small kindness is the most intimate object he owns, read dozens of times a day, and it presses on him the way no house or bank balance could. He lives past the birthday his father did not. The Datejust his father was given at eighteen, in 1974, has outlived him, and it now keeps time for the son who got it at forty and chose life.