This tumescent adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1980s bonkbuster from Disney+ is stuffed with pneumatic talent and opens with a statement of intent.
The first thing we see are the pumping buttocks of Alex Hassell’s Rupert Campbell-Black, caddish sexpot showjumper-turned-Thatcherite MP, as he initiates a female journalist into the mile-high club in Concorde’s lavatory. The heavy-breathing guitar licks of Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love ramp up as they break the sound barrier. Bang! Boom!
We only see Rupert’s varnished-looking face once he starts trading insults with media mogul Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) whose lips are usually wrapped around a Freudian cigar. And then we see – well, everything – as Rupert is surprised while playing naked tennis with another MP’s mistress-turned wife, by doe-eyed, dyslexic, 20-year-old chef Taggie (Sex Education’s Bella Maclean).
Taggie is the daughter of tough interviewer Declan O’Hara (angry, hairy Aidan Turner), hired by Tony as a righteous figleaf to help him retain his TV franchise, and soon enlisted in his rivalry with Rupert. Do try to keep up.
In the Eighties, Cooper was considered raunchy but the sex in her books – like the class-signifiers of houses and hunts – was primarily silly, absurd. Lead writer Dominic Treadwell-Collins and director Elliott Hegarty clearly understand this. Their TV version is suffused with affection for Cooper and for the decade that was once a byword for gaudy excess but now looks rather quaint.
Rivals is gloriously trashy and arch, the epitome of guilty-pleasure TV, everyone smoking and smirking in between the schtupping: even the predatory male sexism looks innocuous from the viewpoint of today’s toxic culture.
The swagger and the sheer star wattage make up for a sporadic lack of pace and a complete lack of subtlety. For those who lived through the Eighties the first time round, the fashions and the soundtrack furnish equal amounts of nostalgia and hot shame.
Hassell and Turner are the show’s big swinging dicks, with Tennant more of an etiolated preying mantis, stalking malevolently through the buttocky countryside of Cooper’s Rutshire, AKA the Cotswolds. Its human heart is Katherine Parkinson as popular novelist Lizzie, married to the arrogant TV presenter who Declan has supplanted, and able to act as Rupert’s confidante as he simply doesn’t fancy her.
Parkinson has a rare ability to communicate empathy on screen, and her Lizzie is set up from the start for an affair with nouveau riche businessman Freddie Jones (an unrecognisably dumpy Danny Dyer). The camera fetishises male rather than female bodies: noticeably, in the montage of shagging that closes the first episode the only objectified woman is Nafessa Williams’s Cameron, the ball-busting American producer Tony has imposed on Declan.
The settings are honey-coloured mansions with horrid interiors and driveways littered with Porsches, plus the industrial-estate HQ of Tony’s TV company Corinium. (Is it just me or does that sound like a tender part of the body?)
The dialogue could have been copied from a seaside postcard. “Freddie’s equipment is amazing,” says Tony’s wife Monica (Claire Rushbrook) a propos the hi-fi in the Jones’s vulgar house. “It’s just wonderful to see her opening up,” says Rufus Jones’s smarmy politico as his wife Sarah (Emily Attack) – Rupert’s starkers tennis partner – blossoms during a TV interview.
There are knowing jokes. “Andrew and Fergie are a modern day fairytale,” someone says of the great royal romance of 1986, the year in which Rivals takes place. (Claire Rushbrooke played Sarah Ferguson in the recent drama about Prince Andrew’s car-crash Newsnight interview, A Very Royal Scandal.)
Before hiring Declan, Tony’s biggest hit was Four Men Went to Mow, a series featuring shirtless agricultural hunks and an obvious nod to Aidan Turner’s iconic scything scene in Poldark. The talk of “revolutionary” satellite TV feels ironic from our fragmented disinformation age.
Is Rivals good TV? God, no. It’s brash, obvious, cartoonish. Is it great entertainment. Phwoar, yes.
