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).
