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. <\/p>\n
That was the lesson from series one of Rivals, an exhausting sex farce adapted from the Jilly Cooper<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n The second series of Rivals<\/b> (Friday, Disney<\/a>+) doubles as a vapid valentine to the 1980s, the decade of the miners\u2019 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\u2019s Addicted to Love. <\/p>\n It\u2019s as if the Netflix series The Crown mind\u2011melded with a lesser Carry On film, but with neither the production values of the former, nor the chutzpah of the latter.<\/p>\n Is there a story? I\u2019m not sure. David Tennant<\/a> plays a television executive, and Alex Hassell plays another, posher television executive. Or is he a politician? Does the distinction matter \u2013 and, either way, are we supposed to care when another bare bum is just a few minutes away? <\/p>\n There\u2019s also Danny Dyer<\/a> as a working-class person living in a big house, a concept that Rivals can never entirely get its head around.<\/p>\n Amid these Jungian cold plunges into the British psyche, we welcome the Irish duo of Aidan Turner<\/a> and Victoria Smurfit<\/a>, who seem well aware of the tripe they\u2019ve signed up for and are appropriately embarrassed. <\/p>\n