I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that no television series in history has been able to communicate exactly what it is faster than Rivals. Its opening shot is a man bonking a red-stilettoed woman in the toilet of a Concorde to the rhythm of Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love, while the passengers outside eat prawn cocktails and chain-smoke like their lives depend on it. At the moment of climax, the plane goes supersonic, a champagne bottle pops its cork and everyone cheers. From this point onwards, you can’t say you didn’t know what you were in for.
There was a feeling, when it was announced that Jilly Cooper’s novel was being adapted for Disney+, that it would automatically be drained of fun. Those fears were unfounded. Watching this show is like drinking the very essence of Cooper, distilled and concentrated. It is a cavalcade of nudity and terrible wigs, an orgy of knowing bad taste. If such a spectrum existed, you would place Rivals between the Carry On movies and Eurotrash.
However, it is also incredibly well made. At times, it seems as if every actor working in British television is in Rivals. David Tennant is in it. Aidan Turner is in it. Katherine Parkinson is in it. Danny Dyer, Emily Atack, Rufus Jones, Victoria Smurfit. The recognisable faces are endless – and they are all 100% onboard with what Rivals requires. If there was any audition process at all, you have to assume that it involved self-taping a jowl-shaking closeup of their face as they simulated an orgasm. By the end of the first episode, almost all of them have done exactly that.
You also have to assume that the target audience of Rivals is the women who stumbled across Cooper’s books on their mother’s shelves and lost a part of their innocence in the process. If that is the case, there is no point explaining the plot, because to these people Rivals is gospel. However, central to the success of the show will be its ability to reach beyond them and seduce the Cooper agnostics. In fairness, its plot probably won’t be the thing to do it.
At its heart, Rivals is the story of 1980s franchise-based regional television, which doesn’t exactly scream sex. It’s a lot of people doing their best to make sure that, whatever the cost, they can produce content with roughly the same level of competency as LWT. A presenter is lured to a station from the BBC and has to try to maintain his journalistic ethics while his employers build a chatshow around him. It’s like watching a biopic of Michael Aspel. Hardly encouraging.
But nobody will watch Rivals for the narrative. The selling points are the setting and the tone. The setting comes in the form of big Cotswold houses, lots of garish clothes and gallons of glistening sweat. The world of Rivals is populated by dozens of shrieking poshos with no sun protection being cluelessly posh to each other in varying states of undress.
As for the tone, Rivals sets itself apart with an operatic kitsch. Yes, there is sex – as well as the opening scene, the first episode also includes a naked tennis match – but all the nudity has an innate campness to it. At no point does anyone appear to be trying to be sexy. This is sex the way British people used to do it, as a burst outlet of our national repression pipe.
Much more entertaining is the fact that the show achieves the feverish telenovela-style dramatics that make whatever is happening onscreen feel like a series finale. Confrontation builds, the period soundtrack ramps up, the camera crashes into a closeup and then, just when you are getting ready for the credits, there is another scene in which exactly the same thing happens. And then another. And then another. Obviously, a formula such as this needs to save something good for the genuine ending. I hope it isn’t a spoiler to say that, in episode one, this comes in the form of an all-cast sex montage. Mission accomplished.
We are living through an age of especially dour television, where even something as innately silly as The Penguin has been turned into a long, flat mumblefest. In this context, Rivals feels like nothing less than an explosion. We should all be extremely glad it’s here.
• Rivals is on Disney+ from 18 October
• This article was amended on 8 October 2024. An earlier version suggested that Aidan Turner and Victoria Smurfit were British, rather than Irish.
