Is there a better villain on TV right now than David Tennant?

Rivals (season two, part two) ★★★★

Is there a better villain on TV right now than David Tennant? As Rivals’ cigar-chomping media tycoon and adulterer-in-chief Sir Tony Baddingham he not only chews every scene he is in, he draws blood.

When told he is the father of a baby (the result of an office shag), he spits: “Get rid of it.” He lies, cheats and bullies his way through the Cotswolds, relishing every scene he is in. He kicks all memories of his upbeat Doctor Who to the curb, and drowns out his mournful detective from Broadchurch.

It’s a performance dripping with venom and so finely tuned that it never tips into cliché. A performance built for the OTT world of Rivals, which returns for the second part of season two with an act so shocking at the end of episode one that I gasped. Surely, he wouldn’t? Yes, he bloody well did.

In any other show, it would be too much. Too soapy. Too ridiculous. But in Rivals – just like in Goldilocks – it is just right. For a big show needs a big villain, and as this second batch of episodes proves, there is no big bad wolf like Tony Baddingham.

Fans have waited five months for this six-episode conclusion to the second season, which picks up in the aftermath of the shock death of Tony’s wife Monica (Claire Rushbrook). Would her untimely – yet convenient – demise curb Tony’s bastardry, or just let it flourish unchecked? I’ll let you work that one out.

Meanwhile, the battle between the rival TV licences – Baddingham’s Corinium and Declan O’Hara and Rupert Campbell-Black’s Ventura – comes to an end, but the real interest, of course, lies in the battle for Taggie’s affections. Will it be Rupert or will she be swayed by Bas? Then there’s Lizzie and Freddie. Never have I cheered on an extra-marital affair with such glee.

And that, for me, is the complete joy of Rivals. Yes, it’s Benny Hill meets Succession, but it’s also one of the most delicious TV standouts of the last few years. The White Lotus may have stolen all the headlines for the unhinged behaviour of its characters, but it’s got nothing on Rivals, which manages to mix deep emotion and ambition with penis-shaped topiary (a sentence never in my life did I think I would write).

It celebrates and excoriates the hooray Harrys and polo-playing cads of Thatcherite Britain in equal measure, never shying from the fact that despite all the excess, for many, it was not great. Find me another series that deftly combines the heartbreak of a lavender marriage with the prejudice of English society, all set to a banging 1980s soundtrack, including a performance from Chris de Burgh (yes, that’s really him!) singing Lady in Red. Truly, Rivals is in a league of its own.

Why it doesn’t generate the same type of unchecked devotion or examination of its big-name HBO rivals is baffling. I do wonder if that has something to do with its source material. It was adapted from Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster series The Rutshire Chronicles, a series beloved by women for its unapologetic centring of female characters and an appreciation of the female gaze.

Cooper was dismissed for much of her career for not being serious enough, not literary enough, but the social observation in this is just as sharp – if not sharper – than anything you’d find in Succession.

Sure, her writing was not perfect – there was plenty of racism and sexism that was, unfortunately, normalised for the 1980s – but she also gave women the chance to be the heroes of their own stories, and she gave them one of the great (inappropriate age-gap) romances of all time.

Rivals doesn’t shy from the hard stuff. It shows the consequences of that sexism and homophobia. And while it’s the men that bluster about (I love Aidan Turner’s hairy-chested Declan O’Hara, but it wouldn’t hurt to turn it down a notch), it’s the women who make the power moves (“I want a divorce,” says one. Yes, she bloody well does!)

As for its central romance, Rupert and Taggie (Alex Hassell and Bella Maclean), are magic as these two, never quite ready to admit to the other that they are the one. It’s a push-pull as old as time –Lizzie and Darcy will be doing it again in Netflix’s reboot of Pride and Prejudice in a few weeks time – and it’s why I can forgive the drawn-out dance they do around one another this whole season. We all know how it’s going to eventually end, but Rivals is determined to make us wait.

Rivals (season two, part two) streams on Disney+ from November 11.

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