But Rivals spent its debut year lovingly building the fantastic world of Rutshire, a haven of the randy upper classes in the careless 1980s, with Tony at the centre. Full of surprises as the show is, killing off a main character isn’t its style.
If you knew them well, you knew they had wit and heart and deceptively deep characters to go with the flagrant excess, the relentless shagging and what are now the rich period trappings, faultlessly rendered in the TV version. If you didn’t know the books intimately, then you probably thought they were shameless, trashy fun, and Rivals on screen definitely didn’t lose sight of that.
To recap: Lord Tony is the boss of Corinium, an ITV regional franchise serving the Cotswolds. His nemesis is Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), a former Olympic showjumper and presently an Olympic-standard womaniser who’s a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government.
But a show like Rivals – one that was so intoxicating with its assuredness, so brazen with its outlandishness, and just so much better than you had any right to expect – has a choice to make when it tries to follow up a storming first season. It can crank up a gear and become even bigger and bolder, at the risk of popping its own balloon and plummeting into absurdity; or it can accept that it has established itself now and calm down a little, which might mean it’s not quite as much of a lark.
In the first three episodes of the new run, at least, Rivals has taken option two. Certain relationships have been settled, more or less, and initially they stay put. Sensitive, principled romance author Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson) loves and has slept with good-hearted, disarmingly frank electronics entrepreneur Freddie (Danny Dyer), but they can’t be together permanently as they’re married to other people, with children.
Rutshire life has become a little more serious. That said, the season does begin sportily, with two gratuitous penises within the first eight and a half minutes, followed swiftly by a beast with two backs in a bay window, a shower with benefits and a “locked out of hotel room in the nude” fiasco with an amusing guest star as the shocked passer-by. (Hang on, is that... no, it can’t be. It is!)
Dame Jilly Cooper died last October, a few months after season 2 of Rivals went into production. But her legacy looks secure: the residents of Rutshire are in safe hands.
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