Rivals Review: All Aboard the Toff Sex Safari!

It’s October. It’s chilly. It’s so much less bother to watch the sex lives of fictional characters than to take off your tights and have one of your own – so, ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding for Rivals. British TV has always loved a toff safari, and after doe-eyed Downton, sugary Bridgerton, and the parade of brain injuries resulting from diving into too shallow a gene pool that is Made in Chelsea, what a relief to have one with some wit. 

Based on the Dame Jilly Cooper novel and set among the horse ‘n’ adultery set of 1986 ‘Rutshire’, Rivals is made for adults. It opens with a knee-trembler in the loo of a mid-flight Concorde and very much starts as it means to go on. The fact that it’s on Disney+ (Hulu in the US) doesn’t jar as much as it would have done a few years ago, when the pairing of Mickey Mouse and a pair of thrusting buttocks would likely have got you locked up – or at the very least, thrown off Space Mountain. 

There’s bonking, there’s rumpy pumpy, there’s how’s-your-father, there’s funny business, and yes, there’s fucking. We may as well be grown-ups about it because Rivals certainly is. There’s no shame or squeamishness here, just a candid acknowledgement that the Cotswolds classes are hornier than sailors on shore leave and unrepentant in their pursuit of a climax. Joyfully, that applies to the women just as much as the men. 

Those men are led by a trio of rutting stags Rupert Campbell-Black, Declan O’Hara and Lord Tony Baddingham (Alex Hassell, Aidan Turner and David Tennant, respectively). Rupert is a Tory MP Casanova and former Olympic showjumper, played by an actor who is precisely what an AI image generator would spit out if you entered the prompts “hot horse bastard”. Declan’s a workaholic TV journalist with a beautiful, horrible wife who resents their recent move from London to this land of welly boots and pheasant shoots. Lord B is a power-mad, cigar-chomping, wiry streak of evil, and clearly marvellous fun for David Tennant to play. 

The women are no slouches in the bastard department either. There’s American TV producer Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams), a character who’d have once have been described as a ball-breaking career gal, but who we’d now just call a woman with a job. There’s Sarah Stratton (Emily Atack), who keeps her undercarriage perfumed on the off-chance of an illicit cloakroom bunk-up with anybody but her MP husband. There’s frustrated goddess/actor Maud O’Hara (Victoria Smurfit), her 20-year-old ingenue daughter Taggie (Bella Maclean), crass scold and social climber Valerie Jones (Lisa McGrillis), matronly aristo Lady Monica Baddingham (Claire Rushbrook), and romantic novelist Lizzie Vereker (Katherine Parkinson) – the only one among them with both a brain and a heart. 

Aptly described by her pal Campbell-Black as the closest thing he has to a conscience, Parkinson’s Lizzie is that for the whole show, and a repository for viewer goodwill. Cackle all you like at the messes the glossy-coated bloodhounds get themselves into, but you’ll be rooting for Lizzie. She’s clever, kind, overlooked by her Accidental Partridge of a TV presenter husband, and the only one of her lot who doesn’t treat marriage vows as a quaint, outdated tradition. When she’s picked out of the crowd by working class tech millionaire Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer), romance unexpectedly blooms amid all the mindless knobbing.  

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Everybody shags everybody – for fun, for revenge, for the calorie burn, for something to do other than ritually murder local wildlife and make fun of the arriviste Joneses. There are so many sex montages that after a while they sort of stop registering – another episode, another pistoning bum and pair of stilettos jiggling next to a pair of expensive earrings. Soon, your mind will wander off in search of a story and thankfully, there’s one to be found. It turns out to be about that sexiest of things – a (whisper it) local regional television franchise consultation (ooh baby).

That part isn’t sexy but the two sides competing for the right to air their TV shows in the South West of England give the show its title. Well, that and all the rest. Rivalry in business, class, love, sex and between spouses is the name of this game.  

You may well ask if Jilly Cooper novels, with all their Tory-soaked privilege, class snobbery, outdated gender politics, and casual approach to sexual assault, are quite the thing to adapt in 2024. Yes, is the answer, when they’re done this enjoyably. Measures have been taken to acknowledge the era’s shortcomings without diminishing its brimming-champagne-flute fun. While the vast majority of sex on display isn’t just consensual but gagged-for (women in the show are voyeurs, fantasisers and pursuers), one story in particular shows the sharp cruelty and hypocrisy of the times, and the grim end result of female objectification. Objections to Thatcherite policy including Section 28 are voiced. Two gay men in love are forced sadly apart by a need for ‘respectability’. The rutting upper classes who love their golden retrievers more than they do their children, don’t come out smelling of roses. 

Rivals isn’t about social justice though; it’s all about the buzz. It’s about power, sex, and women in shoulder pads walking slow-mo down corridors to banging 80s hits. It’s witty and knowing and extremely watchable, and for the older viewer, the nostalgia value is high. Personally though? I just can’t wait to see what Gogglebox makes of it. That naked tennis match will set tongues wagging. 

Rivals comes to Disney+ in the UK and Hulu in the US on Friday October 18.