Rivals review: Jilly Cooper’s bawdy sexcapades novels adapted for Disney streaming series

Is it a sign of our times when Disney, the home of Bambi and Thumper, opens its latest screen project with a scene of a nude buttock thrusting in a sex act inside a plane bathroom?

Apparently, in the 1980s, the mile high club was still cool and not hygienically questionable.

The TV show is Rivals and it is absolutely wild that Disney commissioned an adaptation of books notorious for how risqué they are. To be clear, it’s not one of Disney’s more adventurous subsidiaries (FX, Hulu, Searchlight) that gave the greenlight to Rivals, it’s Disney Disney.

If the sceptics thought that Jilly Cooper’s infamous novels about the rich and bawdy residents of the English countryside would be watered down by the house of mouse’s morality police, they need not have worried.

Rivals is every bit the naughty world Cooper conjured, and it is dripping with delicious devilry. Some of it is erotic, some of it is just crass. It’s Jackie Collins for the tweed set.

Honestly, it’s rare that anyone would give Disney credit for creative boldness but maybe the difference here is it came out of Disney UK and not the Americans.

The Brits have shaken off the shackles of Victorian sexual repression in a way the Yanks have never been rid of their puritanical roots.

There’s a lesson here for HQ. Have fun, have lots of sweaty, messy and orgiastic fun. Oh yes, there is at least one five-person orgy in Rivals, and it’s presented as a perfectly common frolic.

Adapted by Dominic Treadwell-Collins (A Very English Scandal), Rivals is set in the 1980s in the world of super-monied poshos of the fictional county of Rutshire.

The serene Cotswolds surrounds of lush landscapes and country manors is disrupted by the intense personalities that call it home.

There’s Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), the character that recurs most across Cooper’s books – the TV show draws from her second novel in the series, also called Rivals.

Campbell-Black is a landed aristocrat and bon vivant. He’s a former champion show jumper, an eligible bachelor desired by many and very connected to Margaret Thatcher’s government.

He also happens to be the archnemesis of Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), who Campbell-Black is fond of reminding everyone has a title that he married into.

The spiteful Baddingham owns a private TV station that has the highest-rated drama in the country (it seems to be about four hot men who mow lawns) and has lured the pugnacious broadcast presenter Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner) away from the BBC, where Declan felt strangled by the yoke of Aunty’s kowtowing to the government.

Declan and his family – unhappy wife Maud (Victoria Smurfit) and daughters Taggie (Bella Maclean) and Caitlin (Catriona Chandler) – are gifted a huge house and a community where everyone seems to be sleeping with someone else’s spouse, or wants to be.

Taggie first meets Campbell-Black when she tries to warn him of a fire on his land, only to interrupt his naked tennis game with Sarah Stratton (Emily Atack), who is married to someone other than him.

It may only be a flash, but the scene features some unmistakable full-frontal male nudity.

Even though Taggie is young enough to be Campbell-Black’s daughter – which is noted more than once – the two start circling each other.

There is chemistry there. She is enthralled by him and he finds something in her that makes him think there is an alternative to pottering around his impressive pile of bricks alone.

His cocky attitude and dazzling smile is a smokescreen to the gaping loneliness he feels around other people. He’s trying to plug something, in more ways than one.

For all his faults and toxic characteristics, Campbell-Black is an empathetic person, and not just because he loves his horses and dogs — he definitely has a subscription to Horse & Hound, which, by the way, is a real magazine that is still published weekly.

During one of Rivals’ fox hunts, the lone prey darts across the countryside, just outpacing his pursuers.

It’s fitting symbolism – the single fox who’s usually a predator but is being chased by a bloodthirsty pack. Campbell-Black, for all of his ego and bluster, is that fox. Wily but not invulnerable.

Especially when Baddingham is gunning for him – hard.

There’s nothing idyllic or polite about the characters in Rivals.

The “done thing”, that code of chivalry and privilege, stands for precious little when there are social battles to be won, libidos to satiate and C-bombs to drop.

What glorious, sexy fun.

All episodes of Rivals will be streaming on Disney+ from Friday, October 18