#96 Green Grow the Rushes
27/03/23 10:18
Last week, Disney+ announced the casting of their Rivals series, provoking a flurry of excitement on social media. Rivals, for those poor souls who remain ignorant of this great work, is the second and best of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles, which chart the indiscretions of the devastating and dastardly Rupert Campbell-Black. I read it for the first time in my late teens, then again and again on a pretty regular basis throughout my twenties, along with the rest of the books in the set. Rivals was my favourite, possibly because I was embarking on a career in television, or maybe just because it IS the best one. It’s the one where Rupert falls in love - and is redeemed, to a certain extent - but the whole cast of characters, the vast herd assembled and marshalled by Cooper, is a joy.
We’ve got the O’Hara family moving in just across the valley from Mr C-B, racketing round their rambling old priory, all of them chaotic but - natch - also dashing and glamorous. The patriarch, Declan, is a TV megastar – this is set in the 80s, so imagine Terry Wogan, but super-sexy and angry. His wife Maud is beautiful but feckless, their daughter Taggie sweet but a bit of a drip, their son Patrick an angry young man playwright but posher and prettier. And their youngest daughter Caitlin is so cool that Caitlin Moran named herself after her.
There are various other families, couples and cameos - too many to mention – but Cooper’s great skill is that she can embed a personality instantly, nailing their speech patterns, their look, their attitude, so that every one is distinct. And they’re all running off bonking each other, throwing puns around, and the whole thing is utterly preposterous, but somehow, she keeps everything fizzing along and you just want to be there for the ride, to spend time with these awful, glorious, compelling people.
Rivals is a great big air-punch of a book, full of blithe bonhomie, with a kind of garrulous flippancy that’s peculiarly seductive when you’re feeling down. I last worked my way through the Chronicles after giving birth for the second time – those brutal, sleepless nights were spent with Rupert and co cajoling me, and I can’t tell you how comforting that was. Actually, I can. Not a warm bath, but more of a jacuzzi – bubbly, hot, hard to drag yourself out of.
Which is why it’s really important that Disney+ nails this. Having unpicked the cast list, I can see great potential here, plus a few question marks. Alex Hassell has a good heavy-lidded, debauched look about him – as long as he’s blond, I can see him making a decent stab at naughty Rupes. Having Poldark play Declan is a bold choice – despite being a devoted fan of Aidan Turner (since Being Human), I’m worried he won’t have the heft and gravitas of Declan, who I always imagined as older. But that’s probably because I was a teenager when I first met him; to me, he seemed a primal hewn-mountain of a man, like Ted Hughes but more rollicking. I’m also slightly disturbed by David Tennant being cast as the villain Tony Baddingham – obviously the Doctor can do no wrong, but is he really cut out to play the oily, ruthless TV boss? I imagined Lord B as more of a Sopranos figure, so am intrigued to see where Tennant takes the role.
I’m tickled by the casting of Danny Dyer as Freddie, the techno-supremo – he’ll have a ball with that, as will Rufus Jones playing the appalling Paul Stratton MP. Looks-wise, Oliver Chris IS the vain James Vereker, and I love Katherine Parkinson, so think she’ll make a fine Lizzie, James’s way-too-nice wife. It all bodes well, and the script is being written by Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who sounds like he could be part of the Rutshire aristo-set, plus Laura Wade, whose playwrighting credentials include Posh and Home, I’m Darling. Crack on, then, but imagine us Cooper-groupies breathing down your necks, and not in a sexy way.
It’s vital they do the original justice, because Jilly’s legion of admirers depends upon it, and we’ve been burned before. The 1993 Riders adaptation bore very little resemblance to the book, and, like The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous that came after, had such a half-arsed made-for-TV quality about it, with no proper jokes. They didn’t take it seriously. They didn’t take Jilly seriously.
Everyone needs to keep in mind the crucial Cooper-esque quality of humour. Yes, it’s a world where men are men, women are ridden like ponies, and the ponies live in stalls as palatial as Rupert’s sprawling Queen Anne pad, but it’s all underpinned by a keen sense of the ridiculous. The sex is secondary to the laughs. Cooper’s deft comic touch, her skewering of pretension and class, pin-sharp characterisation and dextrous handling of the narrative reins ensures this joyous romp is a laser-focused cut above your average bonkbuster. This adaptation doesn’t need to hit every plot point or even include every character (where ARE Billy and Janey??) but it does need to stay true to the irrepressible spirit of the original. To misquote Declan’s beloved Yeats, it needs to bring the balloon of the book, that bellies and drags in the wind, into its natural shed. And, in this case, that shed is my TV.
I’ll be watching with a glass of Moët in my hand. And I’ll be taking notes.
We’ve got the O’Hara family moving in just across the valley from Mr C-B, racketing round their rambling old priory, all of them chaotic but - natch - also dashing and glamorous. The patriarch, Declan, is a TV megastar – this is set in the 80s, so imagine Terry Wogan, but super-sexy and angry. His wife Maud is beautiful but feckless, their daughter Taggie sweet but a bit of a drip, their son Patrick an angry young man playwright but posher and prettier. And their youngest daughter Caitlin is so cool that Caitlin Moran named herself after her.
There are various other families, couples and cameos - too many to mention – but Cooper’s great skill is that she can embed a personality instantly, nailing their speech patterns, their look, their attitude, so that every one is distinct. And they’re all running off bonking each other, throwing puns around, and the whole thing is utterly preposterous, but somehow, she keeps everything fizzing along and you just want to be there for the ride, to spend time with these awful, glorious, compelling people.
Rivals is a great big air-punch of a book, full of blithe bonhomie, with a kind of garrulous flippancy that’s peculiarly seductive when you’re feeling down. I last worked my way through the Chronicles after giving birth for the second time – those brutal, sleepless nights were spent with Rupert and co cajoling me, and I can’t tell you how comforting that was. Actually, I can. Not a warm bath, but more of a jacuzzi – bubbly, hot, hard to drag yourself out of.
Which is why it’s really important that Disney+ nails this. Having unpicked the cast list, I can see great potential here, plus a few question marks. Alex Hassell has a good heavy-lidded, debauched look about him – as long as he’s blond, I can see him making a decent stab at naughty Rupes. Having Poldark play Declan is a bold choice – despite being a devoted fan of Aidan Turner (since Being Human), I’m worried he won’t have the heft and gravitas of Declan, who I always imagined as older. But that’s probably because I was a teenager when I first met him; to me, he seemed a primal hewn-mountain of a man, like Ted Hughes but more rollicking. I’m also slightly disturbed by David Tennant being cast as the villain Tony Baddingham – obviously the Doctor can do no wrong, but is he really cut out to play the oily, ruthless TV boss? I imagined Lord B as more of a Sopranos figure, so am intrigued to see where Tennant takes the role.
I’m tickled by the casting of Danny Dyer as Freddie, the techno-supremo – he’ll have a ball with that, as will Rufus Jones playing the appalling Paul Stratton MP. Looks-wise, Oliver Chris IS the vain James Vereker, and I love Katherine Parkinson, so think she’ll make a fine Lizzie, James’s way-too-nice wife. It all bodes well, and the script is being written by Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who sounds like he could be part of the Rutshire aristo-set, plus Laura Wade, whose playwrighting credentials include Posh and Home, I’m Darling. Crack on, then, but imagine us Cooper-groupies breathing down your necks, and not in a sexy way.
It’s vital they do the original justice, because Jilly’s legion of admirers depends upon it, and we’ve been burned before. The 1993 Riders adaptation bore very little resemblance to the book, and, like The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous that came after, had such a half-arsed made-for-TV quality about it, with no proper jokes. They didn’t take it seriously. They didn’t take Jilly seriously.
Everyone needs to keep in mind the crucial Cooper-esque quality of humour. Yes, it’s a world where men are men, women are ridden like ponies, and the ponies live in stalls as palatial as Rupert’s sprawling Queen Anne pad, but it’s all underpinned by a keen sense of the ridiculous. The sex is secondary to the laughs. Cooper’s deft comic touch, her skewering of pretension and class, pin-sharp characterisation and dextrous handling of the narrative reins ensures this joyous romp is a laser-focused cut above your average bonkbuster. This adaptation doesn’t need to hit every plot point or even include every character (where ARE Billy and Janey??) but it does need to stay true to the irrepressible spirit of the original. To misquote Declan’s beloved Yeats, it needs to bring the balloon of the book, that bellies and drags in the wind, into its natural shed. And, in this case, that shed is my TV.
I’ll be watching with a glass of Moët in my hand. And I’ll be taking notes.
- Rivals, Disney+, coming soon…
