A man in his late 30s isn’t supposed to fancy an 18-year-old woman. It’s predatory, perverted, and downright wrong. Why, then, is it that so many of us diehard Rivals fans are rooting for Rupert Campbell-Black and Taggie O’Hara? A couple with such a vast and glaring age gap – he works with her dad! She calls her mother, “mummy”! She uses words like “willy”! – that it can only be some sort of TV sorcery that has brainwashed viewers into forgetting it’s even really there.
I certainly did while watching the first few episodes in season two of the hit series, which dropped on Disney+ last week. In case you’ve missed the very well-deserved cultural brouhaha, Rivals is based on Jilly Cooper’s 1988 joyous book of the same name about a group of horny and outrageous high society types living it up in the fictional countryside town of Rutshire.
