Rivals, the Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s raunchy 1988 novel about regional television production in the Cotswolds, begins aboard Concorde. High above the Atlantic, travelling at twice the speed of sound, the recovering showjumper and Tory MP Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) – who is, that description notwithstanding, the romantic hero – joins the mile high club with a gossip columnist who bears an unnerving resemblance to Cherie Blair.
You couldn’t start a story like that today: the plane on which it takes place no longer exists. The result of a multi-billion pound Anglo-French research project, Concorde could fly at up to 1,350 miles per hour, travelling from London or Paris to New York or Washington in just three and a half hours. But fuel and maintenance costs turned out to be higher, and demand for the expensive tickets lower, than anyone had originally projected; the last Concorde flew in 2003. When Cooper wrote her novel, the planes, which could only fly over oceans because breaking the sound barrier made an annoying supersonic “boom” noise, were a symbol of money and excess. Today, they’re also a symbol of a glamorous future that never quite came to pass.
There are many reasons Rivals seems to have struck a chord. There’s the extensive, and unavoidable, marketing campaign. There’s its uniformly brilliant cast, clearly having the time of their lives. There’s Danny Dyer, giving a surprisingly tender performance.
But I think there’s something else going on, too. The world of Rivals sates our ever-present hunger for escapism, in the same way as a lot of TV does these days (big houses, bigger characters, the aforementioned shagging). But it also does it in a different way, because Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire is a world in which empires could be built and ambitions fulfilled, even if you didn’t fancy moving to London. The titillation of Rivals lays not just in the sex scenes, but in its portrayal of an economic boom.
It was not, of course, a boom felt by everyone. The 1980s was an age of ruin for many industrial communities, in which Margaret Thatcher, a (mostly) offscreen character referred to in upsettingly breathy tones, led a government which laid waste to large chunks of the country and treated those who complained like the enemy within.
Others, though, made out like bandits. The 1980s was an era in which you could plausibly get rich without already being rich. That, today, feels like a direct rebuke to the recently departed Conservative government, which repeated the “shrinking the state and laying waste half the country” parts of Thatcher’s legacy, without bothering with the economic boom bit.
Quite the reverse, in fact: since the credit crunch and the resulting crash, the only thing to have boomed in Britain is house prices. The state has been hollowed out, productivity has flatlined and every time it has looked like we might finally get some growth, something (Brexit, Covid, Ukraine) came along to derail it. This has been going on for so long now that you can be nearly 40 and have worked in no other economy. The 1980s may have had riots and strikes and unemployment and a government that hated many of the people they governed. They also had pay rises.
From the perspective of 2024 – and the return of Donald Trump, yet another news event that threatens to derail the global economy – it looks like a thrilling lost world. Who wouldn’t choose a timeline in which fortune seems to favour the brave, rather than the rentier? We all long for a time in which the technology of the future still meant but a three-hour flight to New York.
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