Is it just me, or has TV been especially dour for too long? Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Endless serial killer dramas, from the Sixth Commandment and The Long Shadow to Monsters. Po-faced people talking about political coups in Shogun and doomed lovers in One Day.
At the moment, it seems as though we’re deep in an era of serious television: television that’s tailor-made by streaming services to win awards. This month, we’ve been treated to a feast of sepia-tinted banking in the form of Industry season three. Most of that involves people backstabbing and betraying each other about money. There’s death. And then, trauma. The critics love it. Boy, is it stressful to watch though.
Thank goodness, then, for Rivals. The Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s book has just landed on screens and to say it lands with a bang is an understatement. It certainly starts with one: two people going at it in the Concorde loos.
As the sound barrier breaks, champagne corks pop, and so too do one or two other things. It’s gloriously crass, gloriously camp – and, weirdly, feels like a breath of fresh air too.
Things continue in much the same vein from there. Cooper’s books are of course renowned for their explicit content – turns out, rich people going horse riding and, er, just riding in the countryside during the Eighties is exactly what people want to read about – but there were doubts the success of the novels could ever be replicated on screen.
Put those worries to rest: this is beautiful merging of high-end production values and through-the-floor morality.
Pretty much everybody in this show loves sex, and they’re not exactly afraid of showing it. I can’t remember the last time I have seen something quite so sex positive on screen.
Or so camp. Parents get it on in the living room while their exasperated children roll their eyes and go next door. Naked tennis is played (in a scene ripped straight from the original novel). One of the characters dresses up as Father Christmas and tells his lover he’s going to “come down your chimney.” A soft-porn show called ‘Four Men Went to Mow’ shows up on screen from time to time: apparently it’s a ratings hit. People smoke like troopers and drink like sailors, often while actually having sex.
This rampant horniness is also given a veneer of respectability by its cast, because Rivals seems to have signed up literally every British actor going (David Tennant, Katherine Parkinson, Danny Dyer, Emily Atack). It also takes great pleasure in getting those actors to perform what might well be the most intense sex scenes of their lives. In all fairness, they also rise to the task with aplomb.
If it’s not already clear, this is great fun. There is a plot, but let’s be honest, we’re not really watching for the plot. It’s all so much window dressing; ways to manoeuvre characters into places where they can smoulder at each other before sneaking off to a quiet upstairs room.
In fact, one of the nicest things about Rivals is how unchallenging a watch it is. Yes, the gender politics could do with updating rather: the perils of adapting a book in which the height of masculinity is roistering your way through a village’s worth of women. And the scene in which Taggie is groped by Rupert Campbell-Black at a dinner has aged like a pile of cold sick.
But the overall impression you get from watching is that of travelling back in time to an imagined Eighties heyday where the height of sophistication was throwing a champagne party and having an affair (hey, I wasn’t born then. Maybe it was). Above everything else, it looks like gloriously camp fun. And let’s be honest: we could all do with a bit more fun. Pop those champagne corks; long live Rivals.
