Rivals gets away with so much, and my God, it’s fun.

In the early stages of the pandemic, a couple of theories emerged about what a post-pandemic world might look like. Arundhati Roy’s theory hopefully suggested that the pandemic could be a portal to a better world. 

A rose-tinted view of the “roaring” 1920s gave rise to the idea that we were in for a period of hedonism and liberation. That hope was succinctly expressed in a tweet from fashion bloggers Tom and Lorenzo, who in October 2020 wrote, “Just hold on to the fact that after the last serious worldwide pandemic ended, everyone spent an entire decade partying their fucking faces off.”

Fours years on, very few people would say we live in a better world or that they’re “partying their fucking faces off”.

Another Trump presidency, with all its craven ties to evangelical Christianity and puritanical attitudes towards sex and gender, looms as a real possibility. Post the #MeToo and cancel culture eras, people aren’t sure what they’re allowed to enjoy, let alone do. We’ve been instructed on body positivity and sex positivity only to be told it’s now body neutrality and that sex positivity hasn’t necessarily gotten women any closer to having good sex. 

It’s no wonder then that Disney+’s adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s hedonistic and liberating “bonkbuster” book Rivals has blown past any anticipated cringe factor to win the hearts and minds of people desperately looking for some fun. Set in the mid 80s, in Rutshire, a fictional version of Cooper’s beloved Cotswolds, it’s couched in the safety of simpler times when moral codes were seemingly less oppressive and confusing.

It would be much easier to categorise Rivals as pure escapism if it weren’t so damn clever. The creative team made the genius decision to treat the text as you might treat Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Delivering it as a period piece removed the need to sanitise or “Disneyify” Cooper’s take on class, sex and truly awful but fabulous people. 

There are a few deviations from the book to make it a bit more modern, palatable, and ripe for a cliffhanger ending, but it leaves a lot of the truly awful homophobia, racism, sexism and morally askew politics of the time just hanging there for you to digest without pointed judgment. It is so camp, so bonkers, and so obviously “of its time” that it has, by and large, slipped past the usual attempts to square the values of the past against contemporary standards.

Rivals pits two competing consortiums against each other in what now feels like a quaint battle for a local TV franchise. One consortium, Corinium, is run by Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant as a great baddie). Upstart rivals, Venturer, arrive on the scene led by hot-headed but dogged Irish journalist and TV star Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner), self-made man Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer), and “the man who made husbands jealous”, former Olympic showjumper and now Tory MP, Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell).

O’Hara is new in town, lured away from the stuffy BBC in London to work for Corinium. He brings his wife Maud (Victoria Smurfitt) and two daughters, Agatha or “Taggie” (Bella Maclean) and Caitlin (Catriona Chandler) with him to Rutshire. 

Cooper’s books are so famously stuffed full of characters, most of whom are having sex with each other (in and outside marriages), that they require a list of biographies at the start of each book. It is impossible to list them all, but Nafessa Williams’s turn as Armani-clad powerhouse American producer Cameron Cook and Katherine Parkinson’s perfect Lizzie are worth a big shout. 

Cooper’s books are also famously stuffed with plotlines, sex and arch dialogue that it’s impossible to summarise succinctly, but in short, there’s a lot of sex, smoking, drinking, partying, villainous behaviour, “will they, won’t they” between multiple characters and power struggles over who gets to control what gets beamed into the living rooms of Rutshire residents each night. 

The first episode opens with Campbell-Black having sex in a toilet on a Concorde, emerging from the loo into a cabin filled with cigarette smoke. Not long after, he’s playing naked tennis at his estate with the married Sarah Stratton (Emily Atack). It is gloriously bucolic, and despite the angst and adultery, and subtracting one awful incidence of sexual assault, the characters rattle through the various plotlines and each other with the same enthusiasm for sex, no matter how awkward or outdoors it is, that Cooper gifted them in her books. And yes, by today’s standards Campbell-Black would be in jail, not least of all, for committing the crime of telling Cook that he’s a member of the Cli-Tory party before going down on her.

Parkinson is so assured and radiant in Lizzie’s unhappily married, salt-of-the-earth role and so well-matched with Freddie (the perfectly cast Dyer) that their storyline trumps the central love story between Campbell-Black and Taggie.

There’s no way to expand on why their love story is so damn hot without talking about their sex scene. And there’s no way to do that without talking about how refreshing it is to see 40-year-old bodies on screen. After years of dimly lit sex scenes, willowy Hollywood limbs, and the trends 50 Shades of Grey wrought upon cinema, Lizzie and Freddie bring their sex scene to the screen in broad daylight, under a tree. 

Freddie is fake-tanned within an inch of his life and has a hairy chest and a belly. Lizzie is rightfully and finally seduced when Freddie, in his Cockney accent, says, “Have you got any idea how fucking beautiful you are?” It might be one of the most tender and wholesome things I’ve seen in a very long time. It benefits from a long, slow build over the season and is punctuated with lines of criminally camp but gorgeously delivered dialogue from Freddie like “I love a ladder – stairway to heaven and all that,” after Lizzie’s husband shames her for having a ladder in her tights.

Their chemistry leaves the recent pairings of “older” women with younger men in the new wave of algorithmically successful films like The Idea of You and A Family Affair in the dust. Netflix and the Americans could never. If we’ve been heralding the return of “horny” film and television for a while now, it’s safe to say it has only truly, and fully, arrived now at the hands of Rivals’ dedicated creative team and cast.

Rivals is the second in Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles series, which totals 11 books. A standard of the 80s and 90s, Cooper’s book covers featuring red stilettos and taut, jodhpur-clad bums winked at me from the shelves at home as a kid. I read the books as a teenager for the sex scenes but have been rereading them over the last few years and have developed a deeper appreciation of Cooper’s wit and warmth.

The relief and excitement about Rivals from media in the UK has reached a fever pitch. It’s as if multiple scenes of people shagging with Laura Ashley dresses hiked above their waists and their pants around their ankles might singlehandedly revive the fortunes of a flagging empire in the same way the chart battle between Blur and Oasis did in 1995. 

I, for one, was ready to swear allegiance to King and Country the minute Rupert Campbell-Black skipped up some stairs and uttered another line that has no place in a show being praised across the board: “First of May, first of May, outdoor fucking begins today”, he sing-songs, before seducing Cook (again). I was a full-blown class traitor by the time the outdoor shagging montage that followed concluded.

Couched in the safety of treating 1980s Britain as period television, Rivals gets away with so much. Why we might be craving it is between me you and my your therapist, but my God, it’s fun.

It’s also about bloody time that Cooper got her dues as an incredibly skilled satirist of the British upper classes. Dismissed as a writer of “bonkbusters” for women, there is something as delicious and delightful as the show itself in Cooper being able to surprise and take the world by storm at age 87.