Will viewers tire of Rivals before It runs out of Rutshire Chronicles to adapt? Not if these screen versions of Jilly Cooper’s novels about toffs and hot totty in the Cotswolds are executed with the brio of the first two series.
Like The White Lotus, Rivals has already set out its stall as a brand. It luxuriates in its idyllic location, all imposing sandstone piles and legions of big dogs and polo ponies, and has recruited the cream of the acting profession to inhabit it. The dialogue is smart, the tone exceptionally cheeky. Like the US show, it has a distinctive musical landscape – here, a cod-operatic vocal score (by Jack Halama and Natalie Holt) in which a coloratura soprano delivers a bubbling ironic commentary on the shenanigans on-screen, most of them sexual. A field day for intimacy co-ordinators.
“Intimacy” seems a coy term for what happens here. This is a taboo-bustlngly energetic world of heaving buttocks and close-up climaxes. Those who saw series one can expect more of what kept them watching last year, though they should probably refresh their memory of who was having whom, as the couplings of the first series one still have some currency in the second. Chickens are returning to roost. It’s especially demanding keeping up with the storyline of Rupert Campbell-Black MP (Alex Hassell) as his list of conquests is as long as Don Giovanni's.
Even Lord Tony Baddingham (a saturnine David Tennant), battered round the head by his own award and left for dead in a pool of blood in the series one finale, can’t escape the fruits of his infidelity. Looking oddly like Robert Peston, he has recovered, visibly scarred, and is now callously gunning for his TV franchise rivals, Campbell-Black in particular. But ominously for Baddingham, his long-suffering posh wife Monica (Claire Rushbrook) icily declares war on him in this series, with the words, “I can hurt you much more than you can hurt me.” Rushbrook is superb, the perfect embodiment of wounded loyalty, and very dangerous when her instinctive sense of duty, the calling card of her class, has been trampled on.
Monica sticks out even more this season as being an old-school resident of the environs, a time before helicopters landed on its manicured lawns and its polo players were pinups. Like most of the well-heeled locals, she is happiest surrounded by her dogs. In the same vein, though not the same social class, we have Taggie (Bella Maclean, pictured above with Alex Hassell), daughter of TV presenter Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner), who is possibly still the only virgin in the county, the epitome of everything wholesome and kind. Her crush on Rupert, who kissed her at the end of series one and promised he would become a reformed character, is a key strand of season two, as Rupert struggles to keep his word.
Aggravating Rupert’s progress are two new faces: Hayley Atwell as Helen, his glamorous American ex-wife, and Rupert Everett as her other half, an older man who may actually have a decent brain. So far, in the first three episodes (which is all Disney Plus has made available, before weekly drops of the next nine), the gentler and sadder side of Rutshire life is coming to the fore. The returning chickens bring with them lonely children, blighted careers, pregnancies and unhappy relationships. Even Tory MP Paul Stratton (Rufus Jones) shows signs of being vulnerable, and Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer) is still painfully yearning for married novelist Lizzie Vereker (Katherine Parkinson, pictured below with Danny Dyer).
But the series opener is a hoot, an hour of mayhem. The recap is swiftly dealt with, and then it’s swiftly on to the first set-piece, a polo competition in which the two rival TV companies have a stake. “Fred-Fred” is team captain on one side, as well as the host of the event, which his sadly pointless wife (wonderful Lisa McGrillis) hopes will boost their social cred. What it devolves into, though, is riotous skinny-dipping – young men performing naked cannonballs in the lavish pool. The scene where the two teams ride onto the pitch in a long line, in slo-mo, has all the insouciance of the cool dudes in Reservoir Dogs.
As in the Tarantino film, the jukebox soundtrack here is chosen with impeccable care: “Making Your Mind Up” for the general election: “The Chicken Song", with daft accompanying gestures, for the post-election party; Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” as hostilities heat up. Simple scenes are delivered with a big wink, like the one where Declan (Aidan Turner) is ejected from his hotel room naked by his angry wife, to find he’s being ogled by Pam St Clement and friend. He grabs an item from a passing room service trolley to cover his crotch, which turns out to be a packet of Crunchy Nuts.
There’s an end-of-pier streak of humour running throughout the script: you just know that James Vereker (Oliver Chris), who can’t get the swingometer to work in his programme’s election coverage, is going to turn a remark about his “faulty pendulum” into witless innuendo. The line is a comment on Vereker’s charmlessness, but even so, too much of it will grate.
What works best is the sheer English eccentricity of it all. Not the sanitised Richard Curtis kind, but absurd moments such as the one when the Hampshires introduce their rather large daughter and her outsize dog, David Bowie-wow, to one of the TV people. She announces to him she is known as Muffy. “It’s short for Caroline,” she declares, as it this was the most obvious thing in the world.
- Rivals 2 is on Disney+; new episodes on Fridays
- More TV reviews on theartsdesk
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