Yahoo Lifestyle Best of Enemies: Bazaar meets the cast of 'Rivals'
It's 1986 and, high over the Atlantic, a London-bound Concorde is about to break the sound barrier. Most passengers continue smoking, flicking through the magazines and ordering martinis, while the rattling WC door indicates that two are currently joining the mile-high club. Moments later, an unruffled, glamorous couple emerge triumphantly from the loo and the tannoy announces that supersonic speed has been reached: everyone whoops; glasses are clinked; and the thumping chorus of "You might as well face it/you’re addicted to love" is amped up. This is the opening scene of Rivals, the much-anticipated new television adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bestselling novel, and it’s so unsubtle that, even alone in a dark screening bunker below the streets of Soho, it makes me splutter with laughter. It is also irresistible.
The 1988 book is a classic of the Cooper canon and part of the Rutshire Chronicles, a series based in a fictional Cotswolds county that follows the lives and loves of the affluent elite – an area the team behind its new, and first, on-screen adaptation are well-versed in bringing to life. Produced by A Very English Scandal’s Dominic Treadwell-Collins and written by Laura Wade, who was behind The Riot Club, Disney+’s eight-part drama is also executively-produced by both Cooper and her literary agent Felicity Blunt. It is largely faithful to the novel but, as that has 700 pages and 79 characters listed by name and personality trait in an A-Z at the front, the show necessarily homes in on the central plot lines.
The two main protagonists are Rupert Campbell-Black (played by Alex Hassell), a former Olympic-gold showjumper turned Conservative MP (and, incidentally, the "best-looking man in England"); and Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner), an Irish broadcasting star who leaves the BBC to move to Rutshire with his actress wife Maud and children Taggie, Caitlin and Patrick. Declan’s new employer, Corinium Television, is run by David Tennant’s vile Lord Tony Baddingham and his sidekick Cameron Cook, an American producer he has lured over from New York, depicted by the US native Nafessa Williams. They are joined by a large supporting cast that includes Danny Dyer and Emily Atack.
The titular rivalries are many and varied, primarily centred on the struggle to win the local TV franchise; simultaneously, characters lock horns over love, money, class, pets, politics and property, while presenting chat shows, throwing parties and playing nude tennis. The resulting viewing experience is both a period drama that seems set on another planet and a series exploring themes that still resonate today.
Cooper – who, at 87, is still in full ownership of her signature cloud of coiffed hair, inimitable charisma and a hundred-mile-an-hour conversation – loved working on the project. “It’s terribly exciting,” she tells me, with an amazed shake of the head. “Other books of mine have been televised and it was awful – but with this, we took casting very seriously and I can’t fault any of them.”
During a break on Bazaar’s shoot, Turner tells me how Cooper gave a cocktail party for the cast in her garden, and what a ball they all had filming in the West Country last summer. (The latter is clear: he is delighted to see his co-stars, including his mongrel Pontie, who plays Gertrude, the O'Hara family dog, and some of her canine colleagues brought along for a day in front of the camera).
The series appealed to the Poldark star immediately. “I thought the scripts were really, really funny – line-wise, I have some crackers,” he says. Turner's Declan is a big-hearted if not self-involved journalist, wrestling to reconcile his bosses' desire to monetise his charm, his own dream of writing a Yeats documentary, and his need to bread-win for his profligate family. Although this push and pull between being commercial and creative, between the professional and the personal, plays out in a larger-than-life fashion, it still somehow feels familiar to a modern viewer. “That’s the sign of really good television, isn’t it, when it holds the mirror up to our present,” says the actor. “What have we thrown in the trash? What still needs to change?”
The ways in which prejudices have evolved in the past 40 years are thrown into quite harsh relief in the show. Casting a Black actress to play Cameron Cook, the damaged but resilient hot-shot American producer, gives the series an opportunity to delicately include a glimpse of the regularity of what we’d now recognise as racist microaggressions. Equally, Cameron’s strength is joyful to witness. “Such a spicy, smart character – especially a Black woman, who can carry her own and get her way in the male-dominated world of that time – I wanted to sink my teeth into that,” Williams says. “I also love the glamour: the red lip, the red nails.” (The cast have embraced the scarlet stiletto emoji – a replica of the original image on the classic book cover – as their unofficial series motif when posting on social media).
The changing dynamics between men and women are portrayed with a light touch. Victoria Smurfit read Cooper as a teenager, and has now adored playing Declan’s wife Maud O’Hara – an insecure, attention-seeking former actress, the kind of mother who arrives at her son’s New Year’s Eve 21st-birthday party in the Cotswolds on a camel. “There are aspects of Rivals that make you think, ‘Oh my Lord, can you believe they got away with this back then?’” the Irish actress says. “But in the show, it’s delivered in such a clear, fun, gentle, appalled way that a 2024 audience can digest it very easily.”
When I suggest the series has made more of the women and ensured they have three dimensions, perhaps to modernise the story a little, she makes a good point: that Cooper’s male characters – be it the rakish Rupert Campbell-Black or the angelic Lysander Hawkley of The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous – may seem the most famous because it was mostly women reading the books, and the author had designed her heroes – or antiheroes – to be “their perfect man”.
“But look closely, and the women are not less than the men,” she says. “Essentially, every character wants something they don’t have– usually love and safety – whether from their partners, animals or colleagues. Women in this world are entering the era of ‘having it all’ and are learning to be open about what they want – and, by the same token, we are starting to see a softer side to the men.”
This is embodied perfectly in Bella Maclean’s Taggie O’Hara, the delightful, very dyslexic cook and daughter of Declan and Maud: on screen, she has slightly more twinkle in her eye than in the book – a good decision, as otherwise Taggie could be seen as almost too virtuous to be true to a modern audience. “But it’s so nice playing someone with a really strong backbone – it slightly rubs off on you,” says the actress, who appeared in the latest Sex Education series and has just shone as the lead at the National Theatre’s London Tide. “Among all the silliness, the shoulder pads and mad hairdos, there’s always an undercurrent of something thought-provoking,” she says of the show that could prove to be her career’s turning-point. “There’s a love story that blossoms out of something really unpleasant. There’s light and shade.”
But the figure with perhaps the most chiaroscuro is Rupert Campbell-Black, Cooper’s number-one character, into whose shoes Alex Hassell is amazed to be stepping. Hassell is a seasoned RSC actor, with turns in The Miniaturist and His Dark Materials, whose theatre company The Factory counts Mark Rylance and Emma Thompson among its patrons.
“I’m also from Essex, with dark features,” he points out wryly, in reference to the white-blond locks and blue eyes of his new alter-ego, both of which are oft-alluded to in the books, and about which many young women dreamed in the 1980s and 90s (Cooper was initially appalled). “Rupert exudes privilege and confidence, so I had to learn a loucheness. It was helpful that everyone was told to treat me as if I was extremely attractive,” he continues, laughing. “When you walk into a room of supporting artists who’ve been briefed to fall over themselves looking at you, smouldering becomes a lot easier. They imbued me with a certain power.”
In the Rivals prequel Riders, there are some pretty unpalatable aspects of Rupert’s personality – particularly the way he treats women and animals – that haven’t aged well. “We never explicitly had this conversation, but for my portrayal of Rupert, we’ve kept some parts of that history and taken out others. In our version, there’s a loneliness to him: he is a shit, but he has a kindness.”
However, there are two elements of Cooper’s storytelling to which the show stays steadfastly loyal: the abundance of sex and wordplay. Rupert’s dialogue is riddled with quips – some very clever, some very... Eighties. Hassell’s favourite is delivered just as Rupert is getting down to it, and involves a pun that combines Tories and the clitoris. “It was a hard sell,” he says, laughing.
His character and storyline – which takes Rupert on, dare I say, a journey – are key to the show’s charm, pace, plot and socio-political signposting. What would Hassell like viewers to make of the series? “I hope people enjoy it, have conversations about the knottier topics it raises, and maybe have sex later,” he says. “I say that jokingly, but – and maybe this is high hopes – perhaps for people who don’t talk to one another that much, as the series goes on, watching it with someone else might allow certain things to come to light.”
Cooper is delighted by this possibility. “Well, we’re philanthropists, aren’t we? I keep reading that the birth rate is going down like mad. Putting Rivals on the telly may help,” she says, with the enthusiasm of a writer who has long had one foot in showbusiness: in her forties, she appeared in her capacity as a celebrity columnist on the BBC game show What’s My Line, and wrote a sitcom about a four-girl flat-share with Joanna Lumley in the lead role.
Revisiting the world she created – and partially lived in herself – 40 years ago has been bittersweet: it made her miss the era (“it was much more naughty”), but also her late husband (“there’s a lot of darling Leo and his jokes in the book”). Indeed, what today’s viewers may not clock is the real people Cooper drew on to shape several fictional figures, namely the “glamorous aristocratic types who were floating about when I, middle-class Jilly, moved to the country in ’82”. Rupert Campbell-Black, for example, is a patchwork of Andrew Parker Bowles, the late Earl of Suffolk and the fashion designer Rupert Lycett-Green. Her “beloved” Taggie is entirely made up, but the scruffy Lizzie Vereker – a novelist whose husband cheats on her – is, she admits, based on herself: “She is nicer than me, though. I love her – that’s terribly narcissistic to say, but I do.”
Like her conversation, Cooper herself still rattles along at a good clip – last year, she released a bonkbuster about football inevitably titled Tackle!; this May, the King presented her with a damehood for services to charity and literature, and she’ll be tapping away at her typewriter on various secret projects right up to the very moment she is dragged out of rural Gloucestershire to the premiere of Rivals.
To all these endeavours, Dame Jilly continues to bring the same philosophies she always has: a disregard for snobbery (like many great minds, she rereads Proust and loves Helen Fielding) and a straightforward goal of contributing to the gaiety of the nation. “Maybe one day I’ll write something serious,” she says. “But, at the moment, there’s some terrible sadness and loneliness, isn’t there? So, more than ever, and more than anything, I’d like to cheer people up.”
Rivals is now available to watch on Disney+
Styling by Grace Clarke.
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