Rivals Takes Center Stage in Disney's Adaptation of Jilly Cooper's Novels

Rivals: The Talk of the Town

Hang on, this isn’t Rutshire! The Disney+ adaptation of Britain’s best bonkbuster, Rivals by Jilly Cooper, swaggered onto our screens today, positively tumescent with star power, bouffant 80s wigs and more high society sex than you can shake a riding crop at. But our first vision is not of the country manors and busty politicians’ wives that audiences might expect from Cooper’s fictional Cotswolds romp. No, we begin with a behind.
Rupert Campbell-Black – most handsome man in Britain, rider of horses and women – is ravishing the ghostwriter of his memoir in a concorde loo on his way to the States. ‘Addicted to Love’ is playing. The sound barrier breaks. Champagne corks pop. Welcome to Rivals.
While ‘the first not-quite-lady of Fleet Street’ Beattie Johnson is very audibly enjoying herself at the show’s grand opening, what are the critics making of the sexiest show on Disney? One heluva noise, it turns out. While the subject matter may sound somewhat dry – the world of 80s independent television is hardly the juiciest of rump steak – Rivals is the talk of the town. The cast, in particular, are winning resounding adulation for going full gonzo as the sexed-up Cotswolds set. David Tennant, says the New Statesman, is ‘honestly never better’ as television boss Lord Tony Baddingham (who, in a subtle case of nominative determinism, is not very nice).
Baddingham fears losing control of Rutshire’s airwaves in an upcoming bid, hiring some of the most stunningly attractive (and, for the most part, wickedly talented) names in TV. As interview extraordinaire, Declan O’Hara, Aidan Turner is garnering acclaim for this ‘impressive moustache’ and, in the words of Rachel Cook, derriere ‘as soft and pale as caster sugar’. Nafessa Williams brings New York glamour to cut-throat Head of Drama (and Tony’s lover) Cameron Cook, and Emily Attack is the ambitious trophy wife Sarah Stratton (also a sometime lover of Lord Baddingham). Soon, there is mutiny afoot – in both boardroom and bedroom.
In his role as cockney electronics billionaire Freddie Jones, Danny Dyer is ‘perfectly cast’, says The Guardian, though wears a ‘terrible wig’. This was, after all, 80s daytime television. He was, apparently, a ‘shoo-in’ for the role, but The Telegraph names his – ahem – friendship with Katherine Parkinson’s lovable erotic writer Lizzie Vereker (whose odious husband James is also getting it on backstage with Sarah Stratton) as a real highlight.
But it’s Alex Hassell who straddles, colossus-like, over the competition as Rupert Campbell-Black – Tory minister for Sport with a heart set on dethroning Baddingham and shacking up with Declan O’Hara’s daughter. He may not have the blond hair and blue eyes of his novelistic counterpart, but The Telegraph gushes over his ‘bags of charisma’ (and the seal of approval straight from Dame Jilly Cooper herself). Apparently, everyone on set was told to treat Hassell as the ‘most attractive man in the world’, which couldn’t have hurt his characterization.
Speaking to Tatler’s Annabel Sampson of this most ravishing of roles, Hassell recounted: ‘Someone said that Rupert was the James Bond of erotica or something. And in my mind, there's definitely more of Roger Moore… he’s got his tongue firmly in his cheek.’ Many, no doubt, would long for his tongue in theirs, too.
And what of those gloriously camp 80s aesthetics? Horse riders making eyes with the caterers over a mountain of vol-au-vents? Check. Shoulder pads sharp enough to poke out a wandering eye? Check. Country piles laid down in the cleavage of the Gloucestershire hills? Check, check, and check. There are naked tennis matches, musical stylings from the Eurythmics and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, jokes about Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew, and at least one reference to orgasms at pony club.
Rivals may be on Disney+, but ‘Cooper’s 1988 bestseller has not been Disneyfied’. The humour is blue; the politics are incorrect; the Tory politicians are anachronistically sexy. ‘Nobody could write a show now with that storyline and treat it as unproblematic,’ says Anita Singh, ‘but Rivals sticks unapologetically to the spirit, and sexual politics, of the age in which it was written.’
Many critics, too, have pointed out that Jilly Cooper has always been good at peeling back social hypocrisies. Whether it’s desperate social climbing or the dire unhappiness of the great and gilded, Rivals is fabulously fun, yes, but also pays homage to its author’s ‘always under-acknowledged talent for observation, parsing of social mores and her emotional intelligence’. So, if you fancy tuning in to the Cooperverse for some astute sociopolitical diagnoses, this might just be the show for you. But the majority of audience members will, like Beattie Johnson in the concorde bathroom, strap in, lie back, and get ready for take off.