The Independent is celebrating the greatest TV moments of the year so far, from the ones that got the nation talking to the scenes that moved us or made us laugh. In a series of articles running this summer, insiders share the part they played in making them happen.
Rivals isn’t normally like this. Usually, we expect bouncing buttocks and obscene orgasm faces. But the mid-season finale was the most stressful episode yet. The tension had been ratcheting up scene by scene, culminating with a disastrous family dinner, in which it finally all came out that David Tennant’s malevolent slimeball Tony Baddingham had taken his adulterous ways one step too far in sleeping with Maud O’Hara (Victoria Smurfit), the wife of his nemesis Declan (Aidan Turner).
As an appalled and humiliated Monica, played by Claire Rushbrook, headed out into a wild storm in just her slippers, we were filled with dread. “Hello Lizzie, I’m just collecting for the jumble!” she announced on her doorstep, hair askew. “Isn’t it frightful weather?”
Of course, that wasn’t why she was there. Over chocolate Hobnobs and brandy, the two women discussed whether they’d ever be brave enough to leave their awful husbands, and how to set a good example for their daughters.
The conversation they had was one that every disappointed or betrayed woman would find painfully relatable. And the performances from Rushbrook and Katherine Parkinson were Bafta-worthy: heart-piercing yet restrained, and steeped in pathos.
“Will they grow up turning a blind eye too?” asked Lizzie. “Oh good God, I hope not,” said Monica. “Put up with all the selfish skirmishes he wants to get into? Slap ourselves down at the slightest chance of finding our own happiness? Our daughters deserve better. So do we.”
Monica, at last, seemed utterly lucid and courageous and free. But moments later, after she went home to confront Tony and inform him she wanted a divorce, Monica got into a car accident, and seemingly didn’t make it out alive. There are very long Reddit threads dedicated to theories that our “Mon Mon” has somehow survived, but we’ll have an agonising wait until November to find out what happened.
What it was like filming the scene
“I think the biggest challenge in this scene was resisting being seduced into absolutely going for it,” says Rushbrook. “I was really trying to keep at that place where you’re about to burst, but not actually bursting. Because even when Monica is letting things go, she is still very held in.
“It feels facetious to say, but it was sort of like not being allowed to come! I know that’s an incongruous analogy for our darling Monica Baddingham, but that’s how it felt playing that scene. There’s no moment where you can actually have a good cry, or really let it all out. It’s still all: hold it in, hold it in, hold it in.
“We filmed episode six pretty much chronologically. So I was fully immersed in Monica and her journey. It is so moving to see somebody finding her voice for the first time, and daring to ask another character some real questions about real life. Monica has held so much in; she feels things deeply because she’s pushed to absolute crisis, but doesn’t have the opportunity to talk about her feelings. She’s gone out into the wild storm, but the paradox is that she is in an altered reality, a strange, new, calm, eye of the storm.”
The unflinching camera
“As an actor, it was really gratifying because all the things I usually do to keep Monica’s feelings down and repressed, and to keep stoic and strong, fall away. So it was beautifully easy to just let the words do the talking and let her feel her feelings.
“Our camera operator, Justin Hawkins, was inches from our faces, trundling silently around us. There was such a stillness and sensitivity in the room. There’s nothing that focuses you more on the honesty of what you’re trying to do than having a great big black camera inches from your face, looking right at you, into your soul.”
The reaction to the scene
“It is profoundly moving how invested and touched and moved people have been. There’s a fondness for the character that I just didn’t anticipate, although obviously I love Monica so much. And now, people have got this agonising wait for the rest of the series…”
