What makes Disney's Rivals such a triumph? It has more pumping buttocks than the Grand National

I’ve been trying to read Tackle, Jilly Cooper’s latest novel/bedside-table coaster for months now, and it’s proving to be arduous. Having never read any of her books, I’m confused as to why everyone loves her. It’s set in the fictional county of Rutshire, and if you haven’t figured it out by now, that’s a saucy pun.

In fact, it’s packed to the gunnels with painful innuendo and elaborate exposition, breathless descriptions of horses, Labradors and desirable Cotswolds properties, and characters with appalling “foreign” accents that should never have made it past the edit.  

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At the centre of it all is her priapic hero Rupert Campbell-Black, who has now stopped shagging around and owns a football team. (The less said about Dame Jilly’s long explanations of the transfer window, the better.) Also – and this is the biggest crime – there’s hardly any sex in it at all. Zzzzz.  

Am I missing something? Maybe it’s because I’m the kind of left-wing, Doc Marten-wearing fool that her characters would set the dogs on. Or maybe I should have just started with Rivals, because the Disney+ TV adaptation is so fantastically tumescent that it made the gold buttons pop off my Country Casuals twinset and hit the Aga.   

Phew. Where to start? Well, Rivals has more pumping buttocks in this show than the Grand National. Every character is up for it in every possible way, from Rupert himself – a throbbing sex iguana with heavy lidded eyes – to the slack-jawed waitress serving the vol-au-vents. And if you remain unmoved by the outrageous opening scene (on Concorde!) then I’m sorry, but you are dead.  

The main thrust of the story is the blossoming romance between roguish Rupert and young Taggie O’Hara, an amateur cook who mysteriously goes from making some egg-and-cress sandwiches to catering enormous parties.

The O’Haras have just moved to Rutshire from London because Taggie’s father Declan, a PENETRATINGLY handsome chat show host with a big moustache, is the great new hope for a Cotswolds-based TV company headed by panto-tastically named producer Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), who is in secret talks with businessman Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer in a Beatles wig from the Party Shop). 

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Some of the TV production stuff is bit like watching Alan Partridge negotiating a deal in Linton Travel Tavern, but who cares about the plot? This is a saucy romp, so it’s all about the devilish details. Dark glances are cast across the dance floor, deals are made over whisky and cigars, Tattinger is consumed from chipped teacups, there are orgies in the West Wing and romantic hopes are dashed under the piles of fur coats. 

All of this posh smut is delivered with insanely lascivious energy by an ensemble cast that is literally, banging. There’s Katherine Parkinson as the gap-toothed, curly-haired novelist Jilly Cooper (I mean, Lizzie Vereker), Emily Atack, who is caught playing tennis in the nude with Rupert, Gary Lamont as a secretly gay and forever thwarted TV producer, and even a cameo from the criminally underused Denise Black, formerly of Corrie fame.  

But the biggest gongs should go to the non-fictional TV producers, who have pulled off a fabulously overblown and searingly accurate depiction of the ’80s. The decade is captured perfectly, from the puff sleeved party dresses to the dodgy social attitudes. Do you want to see a helicopter going over the Cotswolds to the soundtrack of Def Leppard? Or a bunch of women in pelmet skirts dancing around a pile of handbags? Of course you do!  

So, I grudgingly have to hand it to Dame Jilly. Rivals is a thundering triumph and everyone involved should get tons of awards and an invite to a jolly good knees-up at a stately home in Rutshire. Maybe one day I’ll even read the book.   

Lucy Sweet is a freelance journalist.

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