The iconography of 1980s Ireland: a photograph of JFK, a Sacred Heart of Jesus painting, the Proclamation of Independence and a well-thumbed (ooh, matron!) copy of Jilly Cooper’s Riders featuring a hand touching a jodhpur-clad bum. (Presumably, in the Irish context, this is Jesus’s hand, there to heal the bum in some fashion.)
Jilly Cooper’s Riders wasn’t featured in Fintan O’Toole’s History of Ireland in 100 Objects, but it should have been. There wasn’t a house in holy Catholic 1980s Ireland that didn’t have a Jilly Cooper novel. I don’t think anyone even had to buy them. They just turned up in the house as a psychic manifestation of our repressed sexuality and burgeoning secularism, probably.
Then they would be passed around like samizdat by teenage girls, giving them unrealistic ideas about sex, the boys available to them (I’m not bitter) and England (a hotbed of materialistic smut). Each book was filled with thrusting entrepreneurs (in both the literal and metaphorical sense), philandering aristocrats and sex-positive ladybosses who did as they pleased.
Cooper’s books have a tone that I would have thought to be totally unadaptable. I needn’t have feared. In the opening seconds of Rivals, Disney+’s new adaptation of one of Cooper’s other classics (cover: a red stiletto treading on a man’s hand), we see the supersonic luxury plane Concorde flying across the sky, followed by footage of a thrusting male bum and a moaning lady in the aircraft’s toilets. The thrusting bum is intercut with footage of a spurting soap dispenser and overflowing champagne. It is instantly clear we are in safe, if filthy, hands.
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Rivals: The thrusting bum is intercut with spurting soap and overflowing champagne. We are in safe, if filthy, hands
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The Conservative MP Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) is the owner of the bum in act one. Irish Times readers will recognise this theatrical trope as “Chekhov’s bum”, the presence of which always promises more nudity in later acts. Spoiler alert: there are many more bums. Most characters who appear on-screen, you can be pretty sure, will be baring their bums before the series is out. “I look forward to seeing your bum!” I start saying to each character as they are introduced.
Campbell-Black returns to his seat on the plane, ogled by the female gaze, only to find he is sitting next to Lord Baddingham, a nominatively determined villain/anti-hero played by David Tennant. Baddingham demonstrates his man-of-the-world credentials by reading a big newspaper. This is just as erotic to newspaper journalists of a certain age as a thrusting bum. “Phwoar, check out Baddingham’s big broadsheet!” we say in unison and fantasise about an era when our industry had a firm grasp of the content pipe.
Baddingham tells Campbell-Black all about the expensive investments he’s making in Corinium, his local television network. He has, for example, hired and is sleeping with a hotshot US executive called Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams). And he has wooed a Woganesque Irish presenter named Declan O’Hara (a richly mustachioed Aidan Turner) from the BBC, where he was being stifled by “rules” and “convention”. Soon enough O’Hara is striding toplessly through a kitchen. You’ll know this torso from such shows as Poldark, where it was bared frequently. This move is, in many ways, a Turner classic.
O’Hara takes his family off to the Cotswolds to live amid its wife-swapping poshos. The move angers his glamorous wife, Maud (an excellent Victoria Smurfit), who has been having affairs out of boredom, but it intrigues his naive daughter, Taggie (Bella Maclean), who is soon impressed by a totally nude, tennis-playing Campbell-Black. What is it about him? Who can say? It’s a big part.
Jilly Cooper’s oeuvre is, basically, the erotic wing of Thatcherism: bums and balance sheets. This adaptation, by Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Laura Wade, is true to the spirit of the books. The engine of the drama is business intrigue – Baddingham’s attempt to woo investors to his business and crush his enemies – but this is sprinkled with posh rutting at every opportunity, like a sex garnish.
The cast are all brilliant, and they wisely take it all very seriously. Nobody hams it up. If the scenery is occasionally chewed, this is simply a matter of that scenery being delicious – the setting, the clothes, the cars, the houses, the horses. Everything feels authentically, not garishly, 1980s. If you take away the money and the sex and the high self-esteem this is pretty much that decade as I remember it.
There’s the odd Carry On gag. “Freddie’s equipment is amazing,” one character says of a hi-fi system. (If I was in Rivals, someone would surely compliment my “magnificent column”). But the creators never fall back on the sledgehammer comedy of temporal difference (people with too-big shoulder pads and too-big hair winking at the future through the camera lens). No, they hew close to the often silly, often touching character-based comedy of manners that marks Cooper’s novels.
In her own way Cooper is as class-obsessed as Karl Marx, except her interest is largely in all the different kinds of rich person. (She can take or leave the proletariat.) So she gathers together her wealthy characters, from the truly aristocratic to the status-hungry bourgeoisie to the social-climbing nouveau riche (represented here by an excellent Danny Dyer) at shooting parties and balls and dinner parties, humanises them and then has them have enthusiastic sex with one another.
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“We’re not so different, you and I,” she seems to say. “Are we not all, in a very real way, incredibly rich and riding one another?” It’s arguably a Cooperian version of Hegel’s dialectic (“thesis, antithesis, yes, yes, yes!”).
The first episode ends, appropriately enough, with a montage of sex scenes, but there’s more to it than that. To Irish people in the 1980s this sort of class-conscious, bum-filled drama was a revelation. We only had one kind of rich person – Charles Haughey – and only a handful of us knew what his bum looked like. Rivals is beautifully made, grippingly fun and surprisingly moving, with lots of good characters and, also, bums. Feel free to use this on the poster, Disney.
If you need to detox from all the 1980s flash you can drop into Slow Horses (Apple TV+) the new season of which came to an end last week. It’s the best drama on TV right now, a grotty spy story set in a rundown unit for disgraced MI5 agents, headed by the secretive and grouchy Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman). Oldman is so convincingly and excellently grimy you can smell him.
For four seasons its showrunner, Will Smith, has marshalled Mick Herron’s novels in a manner that’s reliably gripping, frequently funny and always surprising. In Smith/Herron’s hands characters who could be stock feel unique. This often leads, amid the excitement and humour, to scenarios that are genuinely affecting. Some characters die without warning. Old spies live in touching decline. This season the spying wunderkind River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) reckons with the dementia of his former-spymaster grandfather (Jonathan Pryce) while rogue operatives cause havoc in London.
There is nothing slow about Slow Horses. Nor are there actual horses in Slow Horses, now that I think about it. No, for riding you’ll have to drop back into Rivals. And when I say “riding” I mean, of course, “sex”.
