Is Rivals the most outrageous show on television?

By now, television viewers should be inured to watching scenes of sexual congress on their screens. With any number of explicit programs airing over the past few years — given that mainstream cinema has more or less abandoned the sex scene, it is little wonder that it has snuck into the privacy of our homes — watching graphically depicted coupling should be nothing especially remarkable. But even so, the sheer amount of intercourse that is depicted in Hulu’s new adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s hugely successful novel, Rivals, comes as a surprise. From the opening shot of vigorously thrusting buttocks on board Concorde — complete with a suitably orgasmic Champagne-pop at the end — this is a show that glories in not just the naked human form, but the possibilities for highly sexualized interaction thereof.

If it had been made for its natural home of British terrestrial television in the Eighties, it would either have been neutered or banned, so we are fortunate that, for all the moral and social decline we have had over the intervening decades, Rivals can now bound onto television in all its priapic, roaring glory. Yet if it was merely an exercise in soft-core titillation, it would be limited in its achievement. After all, viewers who just want nudity can swiftly log onto OnlyFans or its ilk and have their basic needs gratified within seconds. Instead, those coming to Rivals who have been lured in by the sex and naughtiness will not be disappointed, but, over the eight episodes that unfold, they will find something quite different: a gripping storyline, and, most unexpectedly, some genuinely likeable characters amid the grotesques.

The show cleaves closely to Cooper’s original story. The main storyline — the rivalry between the TV magnate Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) and Olympic showjumper-turned-politician Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), both of whom are wealthy inhabitants of the fictitious English county of the smirkingly named Rutshire — is full of both business and bedroom shenanigans, as the loathsome Baddingham and the only marginally less detestable Campbell-Black seek to outdo one another, aided and abetted by Baddingham’s director of programming, and mistress, Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams). The fiery, brilliant television presenter Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner) adds a degree of masculine chutzpah into the mix, and the tender relationship between his daughter Taggie (Bella Maclean) as Campbell-Black is sensitively done; a groanworthy seduction scene, all laying down tenderly in bluebells, is hilariously revealed to be an erotic reverie.

The show is engagingly written and strongly performed, with a cast of British stage actors who are perfectly attuned to the wit and class distinctions of Cooper’s writing. Even if you know nothing about the English social structure, you will soon be made aware of its almost imperceptible gradations. But the greatest revelation, for this viewer anyway, is a subplot of enormous delicacy and good taste, revolving around the tendresse that arises between Danny Dyer’s shy tech magnate Freddie Jones and Katherine Parkinson’s romantic novelist Lizzie Vereker (a stand-in for Cooper herself). Amid the athletic and inventive sex scenes, the warmly depicted relationship between the two becomes one of the show’s most compelling and human elements, devoid of the more flamboyant caricature that lurks around the edges.

Rivals ends on a cliffhanger that suggests that a second series will be imminent, should they manage to corral the cast together once more; on this evidence, it would be extremely welcome. Come for the outrageousness and scandal, stay for the surprisingly sweet heart at its center and revel in a sense of pre-lapsarian permissiveness, when it could be acceptable to behave in a truly appalling way as long as you do it with a certain amount of unabashed chutzpah.