Polish your riding crop: Queen of the bonkbuster Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel, Rivals, is now a series on Hulu. Cooper was very famous in 1980s Britain for her Rutshire Chronicles, a jodhpured, arse-grabbing saga of highly Champagned, highly sexed, and highly heeled British life that offered readers as much mucking out as they could stomach. In the halcyon days before the proliferation of internet porn, these written-down(!) tales of amorous congress revved English engines, with housewives pressed dizzily against their washing machines. Yet the series also went on to become the not-so-secret guilty pleasure of preteen Brits imagining what sex—when finally, finally attained—would be like. Cooper created the blueprint for the burgeoning eroticism of an entire generation.
And so to Rivals, a campy shag-athon depicting the horny autumnal cuffing season of the late ’80s, a time when cads were cads, excess was expected, and people felt the good kind of objectified. Indeed, the Hulu adaptation opens on two people orgasming in a Concorde bathroom while the other passengers sit smoking on a plane (which is both fucking gross and fucking cool).
Alex Hassell plays Rupert Campbell-Black, a retired professional show jumper and minister for Margaret Thatcher’s government. Campbell-Black—the most “I could fix him” TV character in recent history (it helps that he’s utterly loaded)—spends a lot of time being dashing and crooked, putting the low in lothario and lusting after the blossoming Taggie (Bella Maclean), daughter of penetratingly ambitious journalist Declan O’Hara. (Who among us could refuse a quick perch atop Aidan Turner’s handlebar mustache?) The main thrust—rut?—of the show is the rivalry between Rupert Campbell-Black and Lord Baddingham (David Tennant), a television exec with an unquenchable thirst for power who’s likely to arrive via helicopter directly on your lawn. The two men—one born into wealth, the other self-made—spar it out in a throbbing power-struggle storyline fit for Luca Guadagnino. (He would have them kiss, I’m sure.)
Cooper recently said that people are having less sex than they did in the 1980s because they’re out running instead, but everyone—and I mean everyone—in Rivals is making the beast with two backs. Two words guaranteed to raise your heart rate, naked tennis, are followed by a montage of furious humping and a frankly bananas scene in which parents start getting it on in front of their daughter. But the sex overall feels very ’80s in that it’s not particularly pornographic; it’s sort of cartoon-ily blunt, landing more on the carry-on side of the net.
Watching Rivals, you’d be forgiven for asking yourself: Am I here for the acerbic satire of the British upper class or the rampant fingering? The truth is it doesn’t matter. The whole point of the show, much like the books, is that you’re titillated by a slightly ridiculous fantasy: of money, of sex, of power. Cooper is a master of building reasonably believable characters, with reasonably believable rivalries, having reasonably good sex. We’re all seated for the romance novel’s romantic novelty. Don’t overanalyze your enjoyment; just lie back and think of England.