Book Adjacent: Rivals

Back with a book adjacent streaming pick this week, because why not. And this has had so much advertising that you all can’t have missed it and as I’ve watched it I thought I should report back.

This is the pretty starry eight part adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s legendary 80s bonkbuster novel, Rivals. Set in the Cotswolds, it’s 1986 and retired Olympic showjumper and now MP Rupert Campbell Black and his rival Tony Baddingham are jockeying for power. How are they doing that? Well it’s through the medium of regional commercial TV franchises. I know. That sounds bonkers, but it works. And yes – those franchises really were a thing. And there are a lot of storylines going on here from the huge ensemble cast. At the start of the series we see Tony returning to Britain from a trip to New York where he’s recruited a hotshot producer for his company Corinium and then poaching Irish journalist and interviewer Declan O’Hara away from the BBC. And it’s the arrival of the O’Haras that sets up a lot of the events of the series.

I’m going to fess up now that I hadn’t read the book when I watched this, but maybe that’s for the best, given that you often have a picture in your head of what everyone should look like and the show often doesn’t match up. So I went into this with no preconceptions or loyalties and I enjoyed the hell out of it. This is a over the top melodrama where basically every character is doing bad things to a greater or lesser extent. In fact, the only really “good” character in all of this is the eldest O’Hara daughter Taggie. Taggie is 20, and it’s her… complex relationship with Rupert that is at the heart of this and keeps it from vereing over into awful people doing awful things. And I thought long and hard about how to describe what’s going on between Rupert and Taggie, but it basically boils down to the fact that I know that the age gap is too big, and I know that Rupert is probably morally bankrupt, but by the final episode I really didn’t care!

This has also got a lot in it about the British class system – everyone in it is rich, but they’re not all posh. And the way you can tell is through a myriad of tiny and bigger things – from Valerie’s double glazing and uncertainty about whether she should be saying dessert or pudding, to Tony’s insecurity about his grammar school education compared to Rupert’s at Harrow and much, much more. It’s so clever. Oh, and there is so much sex. From opening on a couple joining the mile high club in Concord’s toilet to fourways and pretty much everything inbetween. Excess is the word of the day – and there’s a lot of 80s excess in here. Your mileage may vary on that – and also on the sexual politics. I could have done without Rupert’s behaviour towards Taggie at the dinner party and I could definitely have done the full visuals on the nasty rape in episode six, but for the most part I just tried to see it as a product of a different time that the show runners haven’t tried to modernise too much because if you did that you would lose a lot of the rest of what makes it so much fun.

I watched the first four episodes in Essex the other week, and I then watched them again with Him Indoors so that I could watch the rest of the episodes with him and I could happily watch the whole thing again – maybe now with the benefit of fast forwarding the bits I didn’t love. And can we have series two stat please – there is so much left unfinished they can’t just keep us hanging surely…