Benny Hill meets Succession: Rivals is the most OTT fun you’ll have this year

Rivals (season two) ★★★★

It’s not often I would willingly describe a show – or anything! – as saucy, but there is no other way to describe Rivals, the enormously fun adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles.

It’s Benny Hill meets Succession, but with real heart underneath the high bare bottom count. Season one took me completely by surprise – its story about rival groups battling for a regional TV licence in the Cotswolds shouldn’t have been this much fun, but it had me hooked. As chief villain Lord Tony Baddingham, David Tennant chewed his cigar and every scene he was in, while his rivals – Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) and Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner) – were charming cads, but I couldn’t get enough!

The secret to the show’s success is simple: It’s proper grown-up TV that has no shame in being downright entertaining. There’s no murder, horror, orcs or revision of the past, it revels in how OTT the 1980s were. This is not stealth wealth, aka Succession, this is my-puffed-sleeves-are-bigger-than-yours wealth, and I-have-a-couple-of-peacocks-roaming- in-the-front-garden-of-the-family-estate levels of money. There’s skinny-dipping polo players! Secretaries jumping out of helicopters! And there are dogs, so many dogs!

Yet, among the ridiculousness, there is class snobbery, pain, infidelity and rampant sexism. New money families are classed as trash, same-sex couples are in hiding and women at work and home are treated and traded as playthings.

It’s a snapshot of Tory Britain as it was under Margaret Thatcher, who in season two has just won her third term. No one wants change because it is hard. Life is simple when you can celebrate with The Chicken Song by Spitting Image. This is life before Tony Blair and the Cool Britannia wave, life before Brexit and Reform UK (of the parties contesting the election, the only fringe party is the Monster party).

Season two, which is 12 episodes, up from season one’s eight episodes, picks up right after Baddingham has been clobbered on the head and left bleeding on his office floor. It’s no spoiler to say he survives. Thankfully, so does Rivals, which marches into its second season – on the evidence of the first three episodes anyway – with as much fizz as a freshly popped bottle of Champagne.

The battle for Corinium between Baddingham and Campbell-Black escalates against the backdrop of the 1987 General Election. Campbell-Black, a former Olympian and current Conservative MP, is targeted with a smear campaign, and his backers for the TV licence, O’Hara and Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer) must decide if he is a liability.

Meanwhile, Baddingham is consumed with jealousy over Campbell-Black’s relationship with TV executive Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams), who is blinded to where Campbell-Black’s real affections lie – Taggy O’Hara (Bella Maclean), the daughter of Declan O’Hara.

It’s wildly chaotic – that’s not even getting into the please-make-it-happen romance between Freddie and Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson) and the addition of Rupert Everett to the cast – but oh so much fun.

Dame Cooper, who died last year aged 88, was proudly the queen of the British bonkbuster and the Rutshire Chronicles were some of her biggest selling titles. Sure, some of her books were criticised for their outdated views on gender and race, but they still sold in the millions because she knew that sex sells.

Rivals embraces that sentiment with glee. It’s no accident the opening titles are filled with double entendres or that one of the opening shots is polo spunk emerging from the pool in his Speedos. But once you get past the titillation, you’ll find a series that has something meaningful to say about power, class and escaping your past. But most of all, it’s fun, bloody good fun.

Rivals (season two) streams on Disney+ from May 15.

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