It may be the kind of book you’d turn your nose up at the airport, but this Disney adaptation of an 80s classic may have a new generation on the pool lounger with a Jilly Cooper novel in hand.
Rivals, based on Cooper’s 1986 book, is astounding good fun and manages to stay just the right side of silliness to make perfect escapist television.
There’s a genius that makes a tiny number of these type of dramas work, while most others fall into the embarrassing category.
Think how awful Dirty Dancing and Grease might have been without brilliant casting, writing and a touch of something mysterious.
Rivals has this in spades and repeatedly had me laughing out loud.
The cast is great.
Alex Hassell as the gorgeous cad, Rupert Campbell-Black MP, Aidan Turner as the whiskey drinking Irish TV interviewer Declan O’Hara, Victoria Smurfit plays his highly sexed wife Maud, Emily Atack is everybody’s bit on the side and Danny Dyer is the self-made millionaire, the likeable Freddie.
They all reside in Rutshire, a toffs’ paradise of sex, politics, adultery, hunting, shooting, champagne and big houses, appropriately named by Cooper for a series of her ‘bonkbuster’ books.
It opens with Rupert joining the mile high club with his journalist girlfriend on Concorde on the way back from New York.
Also on the flight is his nemesis, Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) who owns a UK television franchise and is cock-a-hoop after poaching hotshot American producer Cameron Cook from NBC.
Obviously, he’s having an unlikely affair with Cook but that’s a bonus, the real motivation is TV success.
And all begins to fall into place when he finally manages to persuade O’Hara, an acerbic ‘real’ journalist at the BBC, to come on board with Cook as his producer.
Then we’re into the world of Rutshire, where the privileged want to be Conservative MPs, the entitled men are handsy and the new money is to be mocked.
There’s helicopters, croquet and naked tennis, a thing it seems among the 1980s upper-class.
The O’Haras weren’t brought up with naked tennis. They are very much the outsiders. They’re living in a big house paid for by Baddingham but are secretly in debt.
Declan’s desperate for fame and success and hates Tory toffs. Maud is angry that she’s had to leave London and finds herself desperate to land Rupert while her husband is working all the hours of the day.
His eldest daughter Agatha (Bella MacLean) knows that Rupert is a bounder but also finds herself drawn into his powerful magnetic field. She fantasies that he loves her and manages to see the good in him despite an outrageous grope at the dinner table.
Danny Dyer is perfect as electronics mogul Freddie (his tasteless wife calls him ‘Fred Fred’ for some reason) who’s been wooed by the Rutshire set to invest in their businesses.
He pulls out of an offer to sit on Baddington’s board after he catches them mocking his wife. Although, he has taken a shine to Lizzie the most normal of the group, who’s unhappily married to James, a presenter at the TV station who resents that his star if fading following the arrival of Declan.
At the centre of the drama is the clash between the polar opposites of Rupert and Declan which comes to a head in episode four when the MP and minister for culture in Thatcher’s government agrees to be a guest on O’Hara’s show.
Agatha begs her father not to destroy him with tales of affairs, unknown children and God knows what else. Declan tells her to grow up and beams at the thought of the secret evidence stashed in his pocket.
