I don’t really associate Disney—the children’s streamer—with naked, thrusting buttocks, or orgies, or nude tennis, or dinner parties where the hosts stop rowing only to slope “upstairs for a shag between courses.” But let’s just say, having watched the first three screaming episodes of Rivals, adapted from Jilly Cooper’s novel, I bloody do now. This is an absolute bra-off, knickers-down production, wonderful in its recreation of Eighties detail. If you don’t know the plot, it’s simple: a rivalry between David Tennant’s Botoxed, vampiric television boss, Tony Baddingham, and the “handsomest man in England,” Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell). The whole point of all of Cooper’s oeuvre is that we should be fainting with lust for RCB, a bugles-at-dawn apex shagger who falls in love with Taggie, played rather pathetically here by Bella Maclean. But the script is a treat: “Come on, Mummy, if you had to have sex with one of them, who would it be? Jesus, Judas, or Pontius Pilate?” (Pilate: “Much better at parties.”) —Camilla Long
The Arts Intel Report
Rivals
Alex Hassell in Rivals.