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A surprised woman (Emily Atack as Sarah Stratton) covers herself with a tennis racquet while standing shirtless next to a shirtless man (Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black). They are outdoors in a grassy field with trees in the background. (Credit: Disney+, additional design: Anna Rawhiti-Connell)
Naked tennis anyone? Emily Atack as Sarah Stratton and Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black get the Rivals party started (Credit: Disney+)

Pop CultureOctober 30, 2024

Why the sex scene of the year is from the very British, Disney-produced Rivals

A surprised woman (Emily Atack as Sarah Stratton) covers herself with a tennis racquet while standing shirtless next to a shirtless man (Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black). They are outdoors in a grassy field with trees in the background. (Credit: Disney+, additional design: Anna Rawhiti-Connell)
Naked tennis anyone? Emily Atack as Sarah Stratton and Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black get the Rivals party started (Credit: Disney+)

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. 

The cast of Disney+’s Rivals in formal attire gather outside a grand estate. They are arranged around ornate garden furniture, with a picnic basket, tea set, and a cake on the table. Front row from left to right: Emily Atack as Sarah Stratton, Rufus Jones as Paul Stratton, Nafessa Williams as Cameron Cook, David Tennant as Lord Tony Baddingham, Oliver Chris as James Vereker, Katherine Parkinson as Lizzie Vereker and Danny Dyer as Freddie Jones. Back row from left to right: Luke Pasqualino as Basil 'Bas' Baddingham, Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black, Bella Maclean as Agatha ‘Taggie’ O'Hara, Claire Rushbrook as Lady Monica Baddingham, Aidan Turner as Declan O'Hara Victoria Smurfit as Maud O'Hara and Lisa McGrillis as Valerie Jones
The cast of Rivals (Credit: Disney+)

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.

Katherine Parkinson as Lizzie Vereker and Danny Dyer as Freddie Jones in ‘Rivals’ (Credit: Disney+)

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.

Three different covers of the book "Rivals" by Jilly Cooper are displayed. The first features red heels, the second an elegant leg with a red high heel, and the third shows the cast of the Disney+ TV show, including Alex Hassell, David Tennant, Aidan Turner, Bella Maclean and Nafessa Williams.
Three different covers of “Rivals” by Jilly Cooper with the latest missing the famous red shoe (Credit: Penguin Random House)

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.

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Anna Rawhiti-Connell
— Senior writer
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Two nights at the same gig? It’s more likely than you think.
Two nights at the same gig? It’s more likely than you think.

Pop CultureOctober 30, 2024

Review: Thom Yorke was so good I went two nights in a row

Two nights at the same gig? It’s more likely than you think.
Two nights at the same gig? It’s more likely than you think.

Lyric Waiwiri-Smith makes the case for seeing your favourite artist in concert again, and again, and again.

You’d be forgiven for thinking Spark Arena was hosting multiple daddy-daughter nights over the long weekend. In pairs of geezers and Gen Zers, retired sad-teenagers-turned-fathers took their children for a musical education by way of Thom Yorke’s solo show in Auckland. The young girl sitting in front of me seemed pained throughout, but myself and the man I sat next to on Saturday had shared a laugh before the show – we’d already seen Yorke the night before.

Titled “everything”, Yorke’s solo tour is a walk down memory lane of the career of a melancholic man who is treated as a god by other sad men, covering …. Everything. As well as Radiohead’s nine-album strong discography, Yorke has released three solo projects, a recent album with The Smile, and in two hours he manages to cover all these bases, while making plenty of room for what everyone is really here to see: their favourite Radiohead deep cuts.

With just himself, a guitar passed along by stagehands and DJ decks and synths covering all of his angles, Yorke told the crowd on Friday night he “fucking hate[s] working alone”. But a one-man show, dipping between glitchy beats and piano ballads, made Yorke appear perfectly in his element as he danced between the dials, keys and machines. The lack of sonic coherence didn’t really matter much – it was just like listening to a Radiohead album.

Those expecting an hour or so of music to cry to may have temporarily believed their fate had been sealed when Yorke opened the show with slow burners ‘The Eraser’, ‘Let Down’ and ‘Last I Heard’. Then he played ‘Packt Like Sardines’, and the show really kicked off with the peaks and valleys in sounds he’s traversed through the years, whether it was the stripped back ‘Videotape’ or electronic tracks ‘Not the News’ and ‘Cymbal Rush’, amped up enough to blow through Spark Arena’s roof.

Thom Yorke at Spark Arena.

But the roof didn’t blow, because in a rare feat for the venue, Spark Arena sounded its best for Yorke. It’s hardly an arena famous for its quality acoustics, and the last time I was there, you could barely hear the performer. But the sound mixing this time around was perfect, and made even better by Yorke’s dad-like dancing and the animations glitching his face on the big screen. The only thing that would have made the scene-setting better would have been to remove the ground floor seating, and let the Gen Xers have at it.

The crowd was playing the hardest-ever round of Try Not to Heckle, which is a classic among New Zealand audiences. In every moment of silence between songs, someone took the opportunity to yell something out to Yorke, with a lot of “I love yous” and a few song requests, including “play something eclectic and weird”. I think artists should be allowed to straight up tell their audience to shut up, but Yorke managed to do this without losing his cool: “I’m busy!”

There was the haunting rework of ‘Volk’, the solo debut of ‘All I Need’ and ‘Kid A’, and an acoustic rendition of ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ that made Friday night both a dancehall for the wallflowers, and a moment of catharsis for die-hard fans. It was only Yorke’s second show on the Everything tour, and seemed to reveal a trend: he’d switched up the setlist first performed in Christchurch, swapping out half the set for something new.

I bought a kebab after the show, on a comedown from hearing ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ and ‘Lucky’, and my phone immediately delivered one of my favourite alerts: your bank account is overdrawn. Despite this, I dipped into my savings the next day to go see Yorke again, a decision made first thing on Saturday morning after laying in bed wondering, “but what if he plays …”. Myself and the man next to me on Saturday weren’t the only people who had come back for more – a friend had texted me earlier in the day with the same plan, and also ended up sitting next to someone in the same position.

The tickets left for last minute purchases were views from the gods and “restricted view” seating lower in the stands, and I went for the latter. A restricted view seating ticket at Spark Arena will set you back $85 including GST and fees for breathing inside and whatever add-ons ticket sellers like to charge these days, but it turned out to a full view, better than the seat I was in the night before, which I paid $130 for. So just so you know, a last minute seat isn’t necessarily a guaranteed nosebleed, and it can give you a new perspective to the show.

As hoped, Yorke switched the show up enough for it to feel fresh and just as gripping as the first time around, with ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ and ‘Sail to the Moon’ as his openers. Anima’s ‘Dawn Chorus’ was played, as were Radiohead deep cuts ‘The Daily Mail’ and ‘Street Spirit’, a performance of ‘Daydreaming’ I tried not to cry during, and one of Yorke’s few feature songs, Unkle’s ‘Rabbit in Your Headlights’. When the songs he played the night before came back around – ‘Packt Like Sardines’, ‘Not the News’ and ‘Volk’ – it was just another opportunity to appreciate the way a song can change when it’s taken from a band’s recording to a soloist’s performance.

It was when he closed his set with ‘Airbag’ that my decision to sink myself $85 further in debt really paid off. The OK Computer opener, about Yorke’s near-death experience in a car crash, is generally not recognised as the most memorable song from that album, nor Radiohead’s discography in general. But Yorke’s amazement at being alive and the picture he paints of being “born again” in a “jackknifed juggernaut” or in an “interstellar burst” had always gripped me, and in that moment, a song saved my life.

Immediate disbelief and catharsis rolled into one.

I would easily spend another $85 on the off-chance of hearing Yorke play ‘Exit Music’ or ‘How to Disappear Completely’. We don’t know, with Radiohead on an apparent hiatus and having made the bulk of their music when I was a child, when Yorke will come around again. I’d already assumed my dreams of hearing Radiohead live may never come to fruition. That’s why, if you’ve got the means or you’re willing to spare your savings, you should always see your favourite artist as many times as you want.

Maybe to some it comes off as silly stanning, or a bit of frivolous spending in a cost of living crisis, and in the latter case I’d direct you to that Karl Marx quote about your experience of culture informing your personal capital, and the more you save from sparing money on cultural experiences such as the theatre and the like, the less your value of life, and blah, blah, blah. We shouldn’t have to experience art as a one-off, or not at all, on the balance of our finances and time – in an ideal world, we’d all be going to the theatre or a venue, all the time.

Diehard fans have been doing this for decades, from the travelling Deadheads and Phish fans to the cult of Florence and the Machine. Even if it’s the same setlist, you could still go again – personally, I’d see every Eras Tour concert if I had the means. But it’s undeniable that the “what if?” – what if he plays ‘Karma Police’? What if he plays ‘True Love Waits’? – will be the strongest force that brings you back, and generally, it’s more than worth it. Just don’t hope for Yorke to play Creep.

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