In the 1980s Jilly Cooper became hugely successful by writing novels about dreadful posh people who couldn’t keep their pants on. The formula was Carry on Up the Cotswolds with a sprinkling of social commentary. (Aren’t the rich ghastly? Aren’t we jealous?) Now, because we live in a cruel and random world, it has been decided that Rivals, her 1988 bestseller, should be revived for a modern audience. Feel free to fall to your knees and scream at the sky.
Rivals (Disney+ from Friday) begins as it means to continue, with a saucy scene on a transatlantic Concorde flight. We are introduced to the caddish Tory MP Rupert Campbell-Black, who is 10 per cent sleazy twinkle, 90 per cent skin so leathery you could use him as a suitcase. He is having his wicked way (“bonking” is the official term, I gather) with a woman journalist in the restroom. Soon afterwards, Romping Rupert (Alex Hassell) goes full frontal during an all-nude tennis match with the neighbour’s mistress (Emily Atack). We also see a fictional movie star assuming the horizontal position with a TV crew member before appearing on a chatshow. They’re all at it. It won’t stop. There is no God.
Bums in the air, pants around the ankles, toilet doors banging: it’s like a Roger Moore-era James Bond minus the comedy. There is, however, the vague outline of a story somewhere in there too. The priapic Campbell-Back is the avowed enemy – a rival, you could say – of the swish TV executive Tony Baddingham (David Tennant). They hate each other, and part of Baddingham’s grand plan to stick it to Campbell-Black once and for all is to hire the take-no-prisoners Irish journalist Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner) to front his new TV-franchise chatshow.
Quite why Baddingham’s professional success should threaten Campbell-Black isn’t entirely clear, but Turner at least gets to use his real accent. As does Victoria Smurfit as his wife, Maud, a muddily drawn character who is down to earth and derisive of the British and their class obsessions one minute, throwing naughty glances at the “irresistible” Campbell-Black the next. (As played by Hassell he is the Milk Tray Man if he sidelined in comedic pornography.)
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Weirdly, the show is razor sharp about anti-Irish prejudice in Britain in the 1980s – not what you expect of a pantomime about randy toffs but insightful all the same. There are references to Baddingham hiring a “Paddy”. At one point Declan overhears an executive “doing his accent” and tells him that if he so again, he’ll punch him all the way to the Irish Sea. In a quiet moment, Maud confesses that their blue-blooded rural English neighbours are a weird bunch – “they’ll ride anything so long as it isn’t their wives.”
Declan seems to be playing a mix of Terry Wogan and Michael Parkinson. Exactly who Campbell-Black and Baddingham are based on is anyone’s guess – the former comes across as Boris Johnson crossed with the Marquis de Sade, while Tennant resembles his raffish take on Doctor Who undergoing an existential crisis involving the potential appearance of a Weeping Angel at any minute. The show also parachutes in Bella Maclean as Declan’s daughter Taggie, a character who seems to have arrived straight from 2024 and is baffled by the sheer 1980s-ness of her parents and their wild lives.
Rivals has an insistently retro soundtrack – Wham! Robert Palmer, The Birdie Song – and it captures the go-go naffness of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. But the sex is silly, prurient and juvenile and waggled in our faces to the point where it becomes a tiresome non-gag. (Why is sex funny? I suppose we’d need to ask a British person.)
Overall, the assumption seems to be that we should all be delighted at the return of Jilly Cooper. Commentators in Britain certainly can’t get over the fact that she’s finally on TV (on Disney, at that). Discerning viewers on this side of the Irish Sea might wish for less bonking – there, I said it – and more plot.
