Rivals Returns: 80s Bonkbuster Goes Even Racy!

Do you want to know how long it is before we see some handsome chap in the buff in the new season of Rivals? 

Set the timer for ten minutes into the first episode and get ready for a double act from the Heavenly Twins, a pair of hot blond polo-playing brothers. 

Do they give Rupert Campbell Black and his naked tennis in series one a run for its money? I couldn't possibly say, but the pair are clean out of their clothes and shouting 'Chocks away!' as they dive into a swimming pool.

It's been 18 months since the first blockbuster adaptation of Jilly Cooper's favourite book in her Rutshire Chronicles hit our screens. Now the 80s are back again in all their hyper-chromatic glory. 

It's 1987 and at the heart of this new season, as it was in season one, is the bitter TV franchise war of the time. 

Lord (Tony) Baddingham (David Tennant) is the boss of the mighty Corinium, coming up against brave newcomer Venturer, which has been cobbled together by his rival, Olympic show jumper-turned-Minister for Sport Rupert (Alex Hassell), star TV journalist Declan O'Hara (Aidan Turner) and satellite technology mogul Freddie Jones ().

Of course, their corporate power struggle is only the stage for the real drama taking place, all the love and lust, debauchery and emotional duplicity that Jilly Cooper so excelled at writing. 

To bring you up to date with just some of the bed-hopping, Declan's daughter Taggie (Bella Maclean) is in love with Rupert, who is also falling for her while trying to maintain his relationship with glamorous American super-producer Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams). She's been having a fiery affair with Tony, her on-off boss who won't let her go.

Corinium presenter Sarah Stratton (Emily Atack), wife of Rupert's fellow MP Paul Stratton (a scene-stealing Rufus Jones), has slept with pretty much everybody and is now pregnant with a baby she thinks is Tony's. 

'Do you remember the day I joined Corinium and we went for a celebration dinner at the Bear in Bisley, two courses and me for pudding?' she simpers at him. 'Eminently deniable,' he tells her as if he's closing a TV deal. 'Unless that sprog pops out with a cigar in its mouth, you have no way to prove it's mine…'

Freddie, married to social-climbing Valerie (Lisa McGrillis), is genuinely in love with romantic novelist Lizzie Vereker (Katherine Parkinson). She's married to James (Oliver Chris), the obnoxious Corinium anchor. He's been having an affair with Sarah too, but wouldn't say no to dirt-digging tabloid queen Beattie Johnson (Annabel Scholey). If you watched the first series, Beattie was the brunette having supersonic sex with Rupert in the Concorde loo in the now legendary opening scene.

Dizzy? You should be, and the second season of Rivals is just as much of a merry-go-round of sex, telly, politics and polo. 

The bouffants are bigger, the chalky pinstripes even wider and the solarium at Freddie and Val's new-money mansion Bella Vista is a riot of peach-swagged curtains and pale mint garden furniture. 

Trout mousse with a dill frill and melba toast is still a fashionable starter, and Mrs Thatcher, fresh from her historic third-term election victory, makes a cameo appearance from her No 10 office. Or rather her hair does. 

Makers Disney have even managed to persuade Chris de Burgh to perform live for the show. 'It says mid-80s in every possible sense,' says a delighted David Tennant.

From the moment the Heavenly Twins (new characters Seb and Dommie Carlisle) jump naked into the pool at Bella Vista, you know you're in for another great ride – as Dame Jilly herself might have said, since she was the mistress of the double entendre. (Note also the moment Declan gets locked out of his hotel room and has to hide his tackle behind a box of Crunchy Nuts.)

So what's new? Well, Tony Baddingham hasn't changed. He's still the kind of super-villain who buys his wife a pair of peacocks for their wedding anniversary and then whispers, 'Vroom vroom' at them as he thinks about squashing them under the wheels of his big red Roller. But Rupert has changed.

Whereas in season one he was 'trouble' (which is what made him so damnably attractive), he is now 'in trouble' as, with his 40th birthday on the horizon, his bonkathon past begins to catch up with him. 'Show jumper and showman, charlatan and conman,' as Beattie Johnson puts it during a devastating TV takedown on the eve of polling day.

'So much of season two is about Rupert trying to reckon, or not reckon, with his past and his actions and the kind of man he was,' says Alex Hassell. 'He's his own man, rebellious, kicks up against authority – but is also seeking to recalibrate himself in some ways. He's not a deeply self-aware person but is attempting to see more clearly.'

As you'd expect from one of literature's greatest lotharios, he expresses this shift through sex. 'Sex is a big part of it. The way he has sex, how that changes and doesn't change, the way he relates to different people, whether he's abstaining or not, how he relates to monogamy and his body and other people's bodies – I think that's really telling. There's a lot of hiding, a lot of covering of emotions this season. Cigarettes and drink really help with that.'

You'll be glad to know he puts his soul-searching behind him long enough to lead his polo team, The Jones Jets, to victory in the Rutshire Cup, one of the highlights of the summer season in Dame Jilly's fictional county. It's the first big set-piece of the new series, a luscious recreation of the author's England, with dogs called things like David Bow-Wowie, a riot of picnic hampers and bunting, not to mention the bare-chested polo players and their groupies, the so-called Stick Chicks.

It might be the location for a David and Goliath struggle for the best coverage between Corinium and Venturer, but it's also a vision of dandelion clocks in dewy fields that makes you ache with nostalgia for the simple summers of the pre-digital age. Plus there's the fun of watching Valerie, still the show's queen of social climbing, committing the non-posh person sin of wearing stilettos to the match and getting herself stuck in the mud.

The sequence took several days to film on a specially built pitch in the grounds of the 12th-century Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, and saw members of the Beaufort Polo Team teaching Alex Hassell and Danny Dyer how to play convincingly enough for a couple of chukkas. 'When we got the scripts, I was like, "Oh God, I've really got to do it",' admits Danny. 'The great thing about Freddie is he's not meant to be that good at polo – he's the patron. But I took it very seriously. I had maybe six or seven lessons.

'The first time I got on a horse was to ride it with one hand and hold a mallet in the other, which is quite difficult. We had the option of a fake horse on the back of a quad bike, being pulled along. But that was so embarrassing I said no, I'd rather risk falling off than sitting on that thing. Anyway, I can now actually ride a horse. I've been lying about it for many years and now I actually can!'

For the veteran actor, best known for his work playing TV and movie hardmen, the gentle Freddie has been a breakout role. 'Freddie touched something with the audience, and with critics for sure,' Danny says. 'Everyone was quite surprised that I could play a character like this, a romantic supporting lead. Lizzie is arguably the moral compass of the show – she's so lovely and cute and clever, so the idea of someone sweeping her off her feet, that being Freddie, was always going to be loved.

'His love for Lizzie in this series is really quite complicated. The last season dealt with it very delicately, flirting with it, and then we had the big moment at the end. This season, we're delving into the complications of two people who are madly in love but married with children. There are a lot of people rooting for their infidelity, which is quite rare.'

Lizzie, typing away on her latest novel in her garden room, knows how hard it is for anyone to have a happy-ever-after. 'With love may also come war, and every war has its casualties…' she writes, though the bloodier war – for now – is the one between Corinium and Venturer driven by Tony Baddingham.

'He's had a bit of a knock,' says David Tennant, referring to the season one finale when Cameron smacked him over the head with a TV award, leaving him in a pool of blood on the shagpile. 'It makes him more determined to win, to succeed, to crush everything beneath him. The safety wheels are slightly off, if they were ever there at all.'

'Find the b****!' is his instruction to his brutish security boss in the opening episode of the new series, since he's unwilling to lose either the franchise or Cameron to RCB.

He tracks her down to the seaside bolthole she's sharing with Rupert, swooping in by helicopter. 'Sorry I'm late darling, I've had a terrible headache,' he says deadpan, as he escorts her back on board the Corinium chopper.

Because no matter the moments of darkness in this 12-episode season, there is the same wit and sense of mischief that made the show such a smash in 2024. 

'The great thing about Rivals,' says Danny Dyer, 'is we're not being apologetic about Jilly's books being raunchy, or about the 80s, which was a mad decade – everyone's smoking, the swearing, the sex, the gay characters struggling to be who they are. We delve into all of that.'

And he's right. Both seasons are a triumph of 80s world-building – right down to the old-fashioned carbon paper credit-card swipe machines used in Bar Sinister, Rutshire's beloved wine bar. 

Production designer Dominic Hyman explains that viewers found the huge old TVs with their VHS recorders, the Walkmans, the scatter cushions and the chintz transported them back to an era that may seem long gone, but is still within emotional reach. Some were so moved they offered up their vintage 80s motors for season two.

The soundtrack adds another wash of longing. From Bananarama's Venus ('She's got it, yeah baby she's got it') playing as the stout Paul Stratton dances in the shower, to Bucks Fizz's Making Your Mind Up as voters turn out for the general election and Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart as Tony declares his all-out assault on his rivals and Venturer, it's one 80s banger after another.

Surely Dame Jilly, who died aged 88 last October, would have loved it. 'She was our grand master,' says David Tennant. 'The uniqueness of the tone comes from her – that specific world and set of characters she created. You kind of know when you get it right. You go, "Oh, that feels like Rivals, that feels like Jilly's world."'

At the end of the first episode of this new season there's a tribute to her, a black-and-white picture of her in younger days with a sexy mane of bed-tumbled hair and an impeccable cleavage. I think we can all agree it's what she would have wanted.

Rivals Season 2 starts on May 15 on Disney+.