I can’t remember the last time I saw so much cartoonish frotting on TV – but Disney’s Jilly Cooper adaptation is silly, not sexy
October 20, 2024 6:00 am(Updated 6:01 am)
The words “you’re going to get the f**k of your life tonight” are quite shocking to hear coming out of the mouth of David Tennant. The most British of British actors – he was the Doctor for crying out loud – Tennant usually plays much less, er, colourful characters than his lead part in Disney’s adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals. And yet, it makes total sense.
I can’t remember the last time I saw so much sex in a series than in Rivals. I was expecting it of course (Jilly Cooper’s novels aren’t called “bonkbusters” for nothing), but nothing could have prepared me for the amount of boobs and bottoms I would see eagerly bouncing up and down.
The very first scene is of Alex Hassell’s bare bum, frotting against a woman in an aeroplane bathroom, her hand working the squirting handwash pump just to further ram home the point.
Later, we are treated to an entire montage of rampant humping – including from Tennant as powerful owner of a regional TV company Lord Tony Baddingham (though we do not, some will be sad to hear, see his bottom). By the end of the eight episodes, the sight of yet another penis barely warrants an eyebrow raise.
Yet despite all the sex, Rivals is not at all sexy. There’s no “making love” here, just straight to the point, that bit goes in there, let’s head straight to the orgasm shagging. In the great British tradition, it’s all very silly.
British people seem to have two ways of coping with the mention of sex. The first is to shy away from it, to dismiss it as crass or rude; sex, this prudish cohort believe, is private to the point of sacred and should never be discussed publicly (and especially on television!). The second – as exemplified by Rivals – is to turn it into one big joke. Neither give the subject of sex the complexity or credence it deserves, but who am I to argue with hundreds of years of social conditioning?
Around the world, TV takes sex extremely seriously. I’ve lost hours of my life watching Americans roll around in silky sheets, falsely moaning just enough to create merely a suggestion of sex, and while I found the sex scenes in Irish drama Normal People moving, they weren’t exactly fun to watch. Meanwhile British television, for the most part, ignores it altogether – our biggest TV touchstones (Line of Duty, Downton Abbey, The Crown, Sherlock) are all quite sexless.
But when sex is part of the story – Fleabag, Sex Education and now Rivals – its either unemotional bonking or hilarious sexscapades. And no, Bridgerton doesn’t count – it might be stacked with British toffs, but it’s made by the queen of American TV, Shonda Rhimes. There’s nothing wrong with treating sex as silly – in real life shagging is supposed to be playful, cheeky fun, and its right that it should be shown off that way on the TV we watch.
Brits take too many things too seriously – our Royal Family, whether to put milk in before or after the teabag, what constitutes an English breakfast, the bloody football. How joyous that when it comes to getting your leg over, we can cast off our buttoned-up stereotype and show the rest of the world that we’re up for a bit of jolly old fun. There is a line, though – you won’t catch me playing naked tennis any time soon.
‘Rivals’ is streaming on Disney+