If you read Jilly Cooper, the first thing you notice (beyond the shagging) is the scenery.
Rutshire — the fictional county where her books are set — is a voluptuous, fantasy playpen. It is filled with rutting animals, beautiful, emerald, cleavage-like hills, lovely houses and hot, horny men.
So I guess it was only a matter of time before some steamed-up, panting, myopic old hairy-fingered exec at an American streamer, in search of the next bit of gorgeous period nonsense, screamed: “I’ll have me some of that DOWNTON-ADJACENT BRITISH COUNTRY HOUSE PORN.”
Only, have they read Jilly?
Cooper, the author of Riders and Rivals (Disney+), is the filthiest person we have. Hers is a driving, Musk-level obsession: people (women) are constantly being hauled into bogs, bent over gates, ridden mercilessly in four-poster beds. In an interview with The Oldie recently, Cooper (87) found time to ask: “Is the bum the bonus hole?”
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, I bloody do now.
This is an absolute bra-off, knickers-down production, wonderful in its recreation of Eighties detail. It is played, out-and-out, as a comedy by a team of perfectly hamming actors who cannot believe the pay packet, including Aidan Turner and David Tennant.
As I watched them screaming at each other, scowling, actually gnashing their teeth, before shagging the typing girl — who, mid-bonk in the stationery cupboard, refuses some booze because “I’m working” — I just thought: well, my God, panto season has come early. It’s hardly perfect, but amid so many gloomy, torrid, woke, ugly, sad, slug-like, whispering, earnest, slow, dark television programs, it’s a relief to find one that actively sticks two fingers up at today’s sexless puritanism.
I’d imagine the goggle-eyed Ritalined moms of the Midwest will watch them as if they were complete bonking aliens.
If you don’t know the plot, it’s simple: a rivalry between 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.
I don’t really associate Disney—the children’s streamer—with naked, thrusting buttocks.
And this is the first problem (apart from the fact that some of the aerial shots obviously aren’t the Cotswolds — they look more like Northampton): Hassell isn’t a heartthrob, isn’t close. He looks like a weird, small Nutcracker doll. Why isn’t he blond? But I guess in today’s snitty climate there are few actors who will stoop to throwing themselves naked across a tennis court, shouting, “Tit fault,” while Emily Atack (excellent as a local politician’s mistress), muff also out, shouts, “Cock fault!”
Anyway, anyway, it’s the minor characters that carry it — Danny Dyer, perfectly cast as the vulgar entrepreneur Freddie Jones, and Lisa McGrillis as his effervescing Hyacinth Bouquet-style wife. 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.”)
As for the sets, well, someone’s had a five-star orgasm over acres of chintz, taffeta and crushed velvet — no effort has, thankfully, been made to make the Eighties look tasteful or subtle or even very nice (it’s almost Last of the Summer Wine). Is Rupert’s house right? Again, I’m not sure — it’s a Palladian pile, whereas I had him down for some dilapidated, sprawling priory with stables, where he could dream about rogering the nuns.
Camilla Long is a columnist and television critic at The Sunday Times
