Ah, Jilly Cooper’s Rivals. Have you seen it yet? Have you read the book? If not, then run, don’t walk – the book is brilliant and the recent Disney+ adaptation is the most fun you can have with your clothes on, to paraphrase one of the songs that features in both book and series. The moustaches! The fashion! The music!
This month over at Five Books For, our theme has been anti-heroes and Rivals is chock full of them.
Let’s start at the beginning. Rivals was first published in 1988 and is a classic of that inimitable 80s genre, the bonkbuster, although it’s actually much more than that – it’s a bitingly sharp social satire, a comedy of manners, and a love story all rolled into one.
It’s also the second book in a series – the Rutshire Chronicles (yes, really) – and while you could quite easily begin at Rivals, personally I’d suggest going back to Riders, the first book in the series, which introduces one of the core characters and the main (anti-)hero, Rupert Campbell-Black, the handsomest man in England, Olympic show-jumper and shagger extraordinaire. Reportedly based on Queen Camilla’s first husband, Andrew Parker-Bowles, Rupert is an inveterate womaniser, memorably described in Rivals as “a particularly nasty virus, that one’s wife caught sooner or later”.
When we first meet him in Riders, he’s much more of a baddie – still handsome and charming but he treats both his wife Helen and his horses appallingly and doesn’t have much in the way of a redemption arc, at least on a personal level. By the time we meet him in Rivals, Rupert is one of our heroes despite his flaws – he’s generally mellowed a little and we see a lot more of his softer side.
Our baddie this time around is the aptly-named Tony Baddingham, owner of the independent television franchise company Corinium, a ruthless bully who has been locked in competition with Rupert since their teenage years.
Our other heroes are the tempestuous Declan O’Hara, a famous TV presenter who specialises in incisive celebrity interviews, and Freddie Jones, a working-class businessman who has built a technology empire. It’s a large cast: Declan’s wife Maud gives even Tony a run for his money in terms of awfulness and Freddie’s wife provides some brilliant comedy, while Declan’s daughter Taggie and neighbour Lizzie give us at least two characters we can really like without reservation. Cameron Cook is brilliantly awful in the book, although much more rounded onscreen, and there are numerous notables drawn into the rivalry, who are fun to read about.
The plot centres around the awarding of the TV franchise for the Central South West region. Tony is the current franchisee and while he makes a fortune from it, he isn’t providing the quality of programmes he had promised the regulators when he first won the franchise, which is about to come up for renewal. He poaches Declan from the BBC by promising him more artistic freedom and while the show is an instant success, they’re soon locked in a battle of wills. Before too long, Declan has teamed up with Tony’s arch-rival Rupert to form a rival bidding consortium, and the battle for the franchise begins.
As usual for a Jilly Cooper book, there’s lots of sex – often between characters who are married and seem to feel no remorse about cheating on their spouses – and lots of backstabbing and intrigue. It’s a reasonably long book, clocking in at almost 550 pages, but it doesn’t feel long at all. The pace is decent and the plotting and characters are interesting enough to make you keep going for just a bit longer, which makes it fly by.
It’s the kind of book you read with a big smile on your face because of its sheer enjoyableness. The ending is suitably suspenseful with a brilliant twist before all the loose ends get tied up.
Fans of Jilly Cooper have long wished for a decent adaptation of Rivals. In the UK in particular her books are beloved, often passed from friend to friend when women were teenagers, or taken from a mother’s bookshelf and read surreptitiously. It must be difficult to cast an adaptation where the characters are so beloved by readers, especially when those same readers have strong opinions on what the characters (notably Rupert, but also Taggie) should look like.
The casting of the Disney+ adaptation is brilliant, even though it breaks with some of the conventions of how the characters are described in the book. There was a lot of commentary online about the casting, with mixed reviews (although the final consensus seems to be positive), but I think the producers did an amazing job. There was apparently a strict “no asshole” rule, which meant that the set was tremendous fun to work on and the exuberance of the whole thing – the story itself, the glamour and glitz of the costumes, the characters, the camaraderie of the actors and crew – really shines through when you watch it.
David Tennant makes for a perfectly dastardly Tony Baddingham, with Aiden Turner playing a very intense, tempestuous Declan O’Hara and Alex Hassel as an even-more-charming-than-the-book Rupert Campbell-Black. His facial expressions are masterfully expressive and honestly, Declan’s moustache deserves its own social media, with Freddie’s running a close second. Oliver Chris is brilliant as the smarmy James Vereker – with shades of Alan Partridge, that other huge TV ego – and the female casting is equally good. Maud’s selfishness and egotism are brought perfectly to life by Victoria Smurfit and Nafessa Williams is a brilliant Cameron Cook. Taggie is another character whose casting departs a little from the novel but Bella Maclean really brings her to life and makes her less timid and much more interesting to watch.
On the whole, the female characters especially have really benefited from the adaptation, which seems to have made them all a little deeper and more rounded compared to the book.
For me, the show was stolen by Danny Dyer as Freddie Jones and Katherine Parkinson as Lizzie Vereker – I found myself rooting for them to finally get together the whole way through the series, moreso than any of the other characters, even though they’re both married (admittedly to equally ghastly spouses, which I think is what makes it feel okay).
They’re clearly made for each other and I loved how the adaptation really brought this story further into the foreground. Sure, Rupert and Taggie are the big love story of the piece, and that’s handled brilliantly too – especially given the twenty year age difference between them – with Taggie playing a much less passive role than she does for most of the book, but Freddie and Lizzie are the heart of the adaptation in a way that the other relationships don’t need to be. Declan and Maud’s passionate but hugely dysfunctional marriage also makes for compulsive viewing and this is one area where the adaptation lacks depth compared to the book, which explores the foundations of the marriage and its issues much more three-dimensionally than the series. It’s still great viewing though.
One of the best things about watching Rivals is how vividly it brings the 1980s to life. The costumes, hair and make-up are spectacular, the sets and the food and the music especially all evoke the time perfectly. Many of the less appropriate attitudes and comments in the book which, while very of their time, are now anachronistic, have been tweaked in the series and the producers and writers have managed to tread a fine line here so that it still feels like the 80s – not too sanitised – but without the eyebrow raises that the book brings to newer readers. They’ve also deepened a couple of plot points to give them a larger impact, which has been skilfully handled although I’m not convinced it was totally necessary.
This first series has just eight episodes and doesn’t take us all the way to the end of the book so I’m really looking forward to series two, which has already been confirmed – I can’t wait to see whether they take it beyond the end of the book or not (I hope they do).
If you love the 80s, bigger-than-life characters, great storytelling, compelling (anti-)heroes, suspenseful plotting and lots of scheming then this is the perfect book and series for you.
I’d love to hear your thoughts – have you read it? Watched it? What were your views on the casting? Let us know on our socials, top right of the page.