Oh, the sheer, unadulterated perkiness of Rivals! As I type, I bounce, like Rupert Campbell-Black in flagrante. Some part of me has obviously missed this: the primordial realm of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire where all things are frolicsome and simple, offered without piety or quibble only for our enjoyment. From the series’ first moments, my (female) gaze has been utterly unabashed. What a multiplicity of backsides are here! If Rupert (an immaculate Alex Hassell) has one that brings to mind best butter toffee, sinewy and bronzed, it also – ahem – has some pretty stiff competition. In the early-morning light of a country bedroom, Declan O’Hara’s (an ideal Aidan Turner) is as soft and pale as caster sugar: a chiaroscuro thrill rivalled only by the Yeats he spouts as foreplay.
But I must calm myself. This is a review, not a naughty calendar. Rivals was published in 1988, the second book in the Rutshire Chronicles, and it belongs to another time: Concorde was in the sky, Chris de Burgh was in the charts and, most amazingly of all, it was then (just about) possible for readers to accept that a sex god could be a Tory MP (faced with the extreme pulchritude of Campbell-Black, who in Rivals is the new minister of sport, we pushed from our minds the various gargoyles who sat in Thatcher’s cabinet). The genius of this adaptation, I think – in context, it’s a kind of bravery – is that its producers have decided simply to go with it: to treat it as a period piece, as if it were Vanity Fair or The Forsyte Saga. It’s very funny; its deepest impulses are satirical. But no one’s winking at the camera, let alone worrying about giving offence. Its stars seem only to be hell bent on giving the performance of their lives.
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