As the glorious adaptation of the bonkbuster returns, show chiefs reveal that Jilly Cooper was so impressed she told each actor they were ‘f***ing marvellous’
As Rivals bursts back onto the screen, the show’s creators have told just how thrilled the late Dame Jilly Cooper was with the second series, how they’ve ramped up the sex scenes and how the actors have surpassed their own high standards.
Emily Atack, for one, is said to be better than ever as promiscuous – and now pregnant – character Sarah Stratton, an ambitious TV presenter who, like many of the men in Rutshire, happily sleeps around to escape her unhappy marriage.
“Emily has got comedy bones and has shown that she can do so much,” declares showrunner Dominic Treadwell-Collins, a former boss of EastEnders. “She reminds me of my friend Barbara Windsor because she’s someone who you assume is a funny little bubbly blonde – and actually has a steel, and can control a room.”
Fellow executive producer Felicity Blunt – formerly Jilly’s literary agent – agrees: “Emily is utterly brilliant in season two – she’s like Barbara Windsor crossed with a bit of Marilyn Monroe, where you have that gorgeous sort of icon of a woman. Much like Jilly! You can’t be a brilliant actor unless you understand comedy, and she really does.”
They are thrilled that actors like Emily and former soap star Danny Dyer, who have their detractors, have proved hugely popular in Rivals, which also stars big-hitters like David Tennant as Lord Baddingham, Claire Rushbrook as his long-suffering wife Monica and Katherine Parkinson as Lizzie Vereker.
“What I think is great about the show is it took Jilly’s books, that had been slightly sneered at as bonkbusters, and suddenly everybody is OK to love them,” Felicity declares. “Jilly got that snobbishness as well and she always said it drove her to do bigger and better things, and to work harder.”
Dominic says there is no place for those attitudes. “I’ve loved seeing someone like Katherine, who comes from the theatre, and Danny, who people sneered at a bit because of EastEnders, come together as Lizzie and Freddie. The love affair between those two characters has been delicious to play with for season two. We’ve been careful not to overdo it, you’ve got to leave the audience wanting more.”
The series is full to bursting with saucy sex scenes, not only between those who are having affairs (there’s quite a few) or in exciting new relationships (including first-timers) but also between – gasp – married couples, which might inspire viewers to look at their own relationships.
“I have friends, and people that I don’t know that well, who messaged me after season one saying ‘Thank you. Yeah, you’ve shaken up our sex life’,” Dom laughs. “This time we’ve been sure to think about romantic sex, silly sex, bad sex. There’s some virginity loss coming up as well. We’ve been very careful with it, we talk to the actors a lot.”
In one early sex scene, married couple Maud and Declan, played by Victoria Smurfit and Aidan Turner, have a particularly steamy session – literally – in a hotel shower.
Felicity, who is married to actor Stanley Tucci and whose sister is the actress Emily Blunt, said she admires the female power on display. “As a woman, she knows how to make it happen for him. You know, once you’ve been in the shower for 20 minutes, your hair’s in your eyes and it’s time to go and lie by the fire. She sort of understands how to bring it to a really resounding, fantastic finish. I quite enjoyed that! Declan and Maud are icons, and that’s their language.”
It is the first of many water-based sex scenes to look forward to, including one between Lizzie and electronics magnate Freddie which Dyer has already revealed involves a “full frontal” from him. The bath scene, which comes later in the series, involves “strategically placed bubbles” to preserve his modesty. (There’s none of that when the polo hunks strip off for a skinny dip though…)
Dom, whose production company Happy Prince now owns the screen rights to all of Jilly’s books, said he knew the second series had improved on the first, because of the author’s reaction. “She saw the rushes from filming and one of the last things she said to us, just the week before she died, was ‘oh my God, it’s even better, isn’t it?’,” he recalls, admitting they were hugely gratified.
Felicity said that Jilly was particularly thrilled by Alex Hassell’s performance as leading man Rupert Campbell-Black, the character over which she was most protective. “She loved watching him play Rupert and that we kept his edges and that he was complicated. I know she said that to Alex, and it meant so much to him.”
The cast were devastated when it emerged the author had died from a fall last October, at the age of 88. But they were comforted by the knowledge that she had been overjoyed to see her books come back to life, 40 years after she wrote them.
“I think the fact that we were portraying the characters as she had imagined them, that felt delicious to her,” Felicity smiles. “She would be walking around on set and she’d say things like, ‘I’m orgasmic’ and ‘I am so thrilled’, and she would say to every single person, ‘you are f***ing marvellous’. We sometimes still say it to each other now.”
When the reviews for Rivals series two came out this week – and they were every bit as good as Jilly had predicted – they were all thrilled. “We wanted to do her proud and now we can imagine her up there, surrounded by all of her dogs, just clapping her hands.”
Dom said the reason the show resonates with so many is that enough time has now passed for us to look back on the 80s with true fondness. “We’re a period drama, which is frightening to say about a period that you remember,” he explains. This time around Lord Baddingham is increasingly unhinged as he battles to keep hold of his TV franchise while Rupert is kept busy with multiple women, competing for the TV franchise and his role as an MP – plus a huge scandal. “As with a lot of powerful men, Tony has vulnerabilities which he cannot bear but we, the audience, can see it,” Felicity says. “Monica is utterly intuitive about Tony, she really understands his sense of status and class, and that his desperate need to win is what makes him so easy to beat.”
The expansion to 12 episodes this time means the writers have been able to get stuck in on some parts of the book that were quite small. “You have these sort of flash moments that we can lean into and create entire scenes and entire episodes around,” Felicity says. “We get to go deeper and broader.”
This includes a particularly destructive affair, which has been brought forward from the end of the book, and a dinner party held by Sarah Stratton. In Jilly’s original the event is just one paragraph to show how lovelorn and distracted Taggie accidentally ruins the dinner that Sarah is pretending to have cooked herself. For TV, it becomes a brilliant farce, with pantry doors opening and closing to allow several of the diners to overhear secrets while in hiding.
Already, a third series is planned and about to be written. So now that Rivals is finished, which book will it be? Polo? Score? The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous? Well, all of them, it turns out. “What we’re doing is looking at the books as a universe, as the Jilly Cooper-verse,” Dom explains. “So we will pick and choose from them all, and play around.” Sounds f***ing marvellous.
Rivals series 2 is streaming on Disney+ from today
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