British television loves nothing more than a cruel aristocrat with a rampaging libido. If they live in a big house built on the sweat and toil of the peasantry, so much the better.
That was the lesson from series one of Rivals, an exhausting sex farce adapted from the Jilly Cooper novel and a celebration of the sort of tumescent twits who have held the riding crop over British society all the way back to Magna Carta.
The second series of Rivals (Friday, Disney+) doubles as a vapid valentine to the 1980s, the decade of the miners’ strike and the Brighton bombing, of The Smiths and The Cure, which is here remembered as a halcyon epoch of iffy soft furnishings and Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love.
It’s as if the Netflix series The Crown mind‑melded with a lesser Carry On film, but with neither the production values of the former, nor the chutzpah of the latter.
Is there a story? I’m not sure. David Tennant plays a television executive, and Alex Hassell plays another, posher television executive. Or is he a politician? Does the distinction matter – and, either way, are we supposed to care when another bare bum is just a few minutes away?
There’s also Danny Dyer as a working-class person living in a big house, a concept that Rivals can never entirely get its head around.
Amid these Jungian cold plunges into the British psyche, we welcome the Irish duo of Aidan Turner and Victoria Smurfit, who seem well aware of the tripe they’ve signed up for and are appropriately embarrassed.
Turner hides behind a vast moustache as a Terry Wogan-esque Irish TV presenter abroad, the admittedly fabulous facial hair eclipsed by the deadness behind his eyes.
There are lots of sex scenes, which are a reminder that, yes, someone is still watching Benny Hill in 2026. These ultimately serve the same purpose as a jump scare in a horror movie: to make you shake your head and then wish you were watching something else.
The exception is the one between Turner and Smurfit’s husband and wife, which seems to have been modelled on a mid‑1990s shampoo ad. Or at least I think it has: by this point I’d shut my eyes tight and was praying for it to end.
Rivals has a rambunctious energy, but what exactly is it celebrating? Go‑go Thatcherism? English home-counties toffs and their tedious trysts? Did someone look at the personal life of Boris Johnson and think, Hey,
you could get some really great telly out of that?
These are among the questions that may ping through your head, though the great imponderable is why you’re sitting down to this rubbish when you could surely do something better with your time.