Rivals: Return of the Rake
Rivals | Showrunner: Dominic Treadwell-Collins | Cast: Alex Hassell, David Tennant, Aidan Turner | English | JioHotstar
It’s bonkbuster time again in the Cotswolds. Everyone’s favourite rake is back again, in a mad dash to outwit the ruthless TV tycoon whose girlfriend he covets. Add a newly rich working class man and a former BBC ace interviewer, and you have a group of friends and rivals who have slept with each other at various times, while playing polo, drinking champagne, and trying to make more money.
It’s the second season of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster Rutshire chronicles and Rivals is bawdier and more bodacious than the first season, with the lovely addition of Rupert Everett and Hayley Atwell. But the stars remain the four men, Olympic champion and Margaret Thatcher’s Minister of Sport Rupert Campbell-Black played by heartthrob Alex Hassell; his rival Lord Tony Baddingham (a delicious David Tennant); leftwing journalist and crusader for the truth Declan O’Hara (Poldark’s Aidan Turner, dishy despite a moustache) and the dad-bodied electronics titan Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer, the most likeable of the lot).
The women exist to show up the many flaws of the men they are married to or in the process of divorcing, but they are also memorable. This is posh people in Britain behaving very badly in the 1980s and it is utterly addictive.