Love, power and Rivals
Disney+ brings high drama and romance with Rivals, an adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper’s novel. DQ visits the set to meet the stars and creative team behind this lavish, witty exploration of 1980s duelling egos in the fictional county of Rutshire.
Rivals may not be the first Dame Jilly Cooper adaptation but it is, she believes, the best by far.
“The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous wasn’t very good,” she says. “Riders was a success, but they changed the plot and absolutely destroyed my macho hero. Rivals is wonderful, though. They’ve made changes and I’ll occasionally have a sulk, but when it appears on screen it’s brilliant. They’re taking so much trouble with it.”
The eight-part adaptation, produced by Happy Prince for Disney+, puts high drama and sexual tension against the unlikely backdrop of the ITV franchise auctions of the 1980s. At its heart are three duelling egos: David Tennant’s unscrupulous Lord Tony Baddingham, looking to revive his lucrative but creatively impoverished company Corinium TV; his archrival, caddish Olympic showjumper-turned-Tory sports minister Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell); and the man who could hold the balance of power, workaholic journalist Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner).
All three are due on the red carpet at the “1987 British Television Awards” while DQ waits outside. Later on, Katherine Parkinson’s perceptive romantic novelist Lizzie Vereker, something of a Cooper surrogate, will be meeting her agent at a snazzy Bristol restaurant to discuss her latest work, inspired by the shenanigans among Cotswolds society.
Immediately apparent is not only the attention to period detail (“My dad had the exact same moustache as Declan in the 1980s,” marvels Turner) or photogenic cast, but the wit and humour of the enterprise.
“Those early adaptations are quite humourless and very shallow,” says Cooper’s literary agent Felicity Blunt, who exec produces alongside Cooper, Happy Prince’s Dominic Treadwell-Collins, Alexander Lamb and Treadwell-Collins’s co-writer Laura Wade. “I don’t know that they dug down deeply enough into what Jilly’s really saying. Those books endure because they’re about class, family and relationships, always within a world she has researched, while spinning 40 plates at once in any scene. They’re hard to adapt.”
“They were a bit ‘Emmanuelle crossed with Midsomer Murders’,” laughs Treadwell-Collins. “We wanted Rivals to feel unapologetically lavish, to stand up against the biggest and best American shows. If David Tennant’s flying in a helicopter across the Wiltshire countryside, that’s a big-budget show. Disney have been fantastic to work with.”
“I took over Jilly nine or 10 years ago,” says Blunt. “Dominic got in touch about the rights. They were still under option at ITV [who produced both Riders and The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous] but that agreement was coming to an end and we needed a fresh point of view. I encouraged him to write Jilly a letter to show a little bit of who he is, which he did, and she just fell in love with him because he’s witty, smart, fruity in the best way. Jilly asked him to write it as well, and he wanted to create a world where you could think of it in the same way as Marvel – the ‘Jilly Cooperverse.’ He just got it.”
“There’s space now to look at what it was like to live and work in 1986,” adds Treadwell-Collins. “Some things have got worse, most things have got better. There’s distance to play around with it, but our costume department and Elliot Hegarty, our lead director, were very keen not to do pastiche. They wanted to really centre it, because so many of these shows go: Rubik’s Cubes, big hair…”
“This is written through a modern lens,” Parkinson confirms. “We deal with the gender politics of the time. For example, Lizzie is appalled by some of Rupert’s behaviour, but not as appalled as you would be now. It’ll be interesting for a younger generation to look back and see how different things were, see how far we’ve come.”
Are there any similarities between Corinium and Happy Prince? Treadwell-Collins looks appalled. “We’re the complete opposite! We’re about making quality television that is beloved by an audience. Sometimes in this industry, we make television for each other. I make television for the viewer. At Happy Prince, you can work hard, make brilliant television and be decent. People often forget that. We all had the ethos of working really, really hard and having fun at the same time.”
Both Parkinson (The IT Crowd) and Turner (Poldark) attest to the positive atmosphere on set – the most fun of all the shows on their storied CVs, in fact. “We were having parties while acting parties,” laughs Parkinson, who nevertheless shudders at the memory of a mass dance-a-long to The Birdie Song that included several of the extraordinary ensemble cast, Claire Rushbrook, Emily Atack and Danny Dyer among them.
“The best of British and Irish and American all playing something different,” reckons Treadwell-Collins, who likens the casting process to “putting together a boy band on The X Factor.”
“I have experience in the wings of what how toxic it can be when an element on a show or film is disruptive,” adds Blunt, whose sister is Emily Blunt (A Quiet Place) and husband is Stanley Tucci (The Hunger Games). “We had David Tennant, the nicest and hardest-working man in television as the example to everybody, but you need to have the right DNA sitting around him – exciting names came up that wouldn’t have been a good emotional fit. It was about what audience they’re drawing in, what they’ve done in the past and how you could subvert that with their casting here. Chemistry and sexual tension underly a lot of scenes, so we needed that language to be easily accessible for the cast.”
A crucial co-star is the Cotswolds itself, which doubles for Cooper’s fictional Rutshire, with its grand country piles (Neston Park representing Baddingham’s Falconry, Ammerdown House doubling up as Campbell-Black’s Penscombe Court) and more tumbledown, charming cottages (Chavenage House for the O’Haras’ Priory). A floor of a functioning council building in the Somerset town of Clevedon even represented Corinium’s offices.
“We could have come up with a version of the Cotswolds in the south-east, but you would have missed out on the Cotswolds stone,” explains supervising location manager Joel Holmes. “Bristol also felt like a good fit and coincided with the Bottle Yard Studios opening up their new TBY2 site, with two tailormade sound stages. The majority of the crew are all local, which is the way it should be.”
This being Jilly Cooper, there is also plenty of sex and nudity, made easier these days by intimacy coordinators. “I think they make the work better,” says Turner. “It’s more inclusive, you have a better dialogue around the work, get it done quicker and get more out of it. If it tells the story really well, I never have a problem with sex scenes.” Which is probably just as well.
While Parkinson regretted “not openly reading books known for being bonky” in her impressionable teens, Cooper wasn’t really on Turner’s radar. “But that’s the exciting thing about working in the business,” he grins. “You miss out on some heavyweights, then suddenly you get an opportunity to delve into a world. The books are really clever, wickedly funny, and with such fully-formed characters. Our show is fun and funny, but I wouldn’t say it’s fluffy. It has some really hard-hitting themes.”
Cooper concurs. “It is entertaining, but I also think it’ll make people realise that integrity is incredibly important. There’s not enough of it about.”
Should it go well when it debuts on Disney+ on October 18, Rivals could represent merely a toe in the swirling waters of Rutshire. “We didn’t want to skip over characters or plot, so this series is just two-thirds of the book,” says Treadwell-Collins. “There’s no point in making something B-plus in the current television industry. We set out to make people’s favourite television show.”
tagged in: Aidan Turner, Alex Hassell, David Tennant, Disney, Happy Prince, Jilly Cooper, Katherine Parkinson, Rivals