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?
