If Rivals wasn’t your standout show of 2024, so be it. It takes all sorts. But if it was, you’ll be in no doubt which was the truest, purest love story. Lizzie Vereker – the self-effacing erotica author, bullied by her husband – is supposed to be plain in the original text, but is played by the luminous Katherine Parkinson. Freddie – the rich but never greedy entrepreneur, bullied by his wife – is meant to be past his best, but is played with low-key, knowing magnetism by Danny Dyer. They are absolute dynamite together as they fall in love: sweet and romantic but also really hot, the living definition of screen chemistry.
“It doesn’t have to be romantic chemistry,” says Parkinson, speaking to me from her home in London. “It’s just when you’re with an actor who’s similarly open, really up for the thrill of the ride. It’s thrilling when you’re in flow together. I’ve had anti-chemistry, too, and it’s been awful.” It’s especially peculiar when you’ve read Jilly Cooper’s book a load of times, and you know the A-couple is meant to be Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) and Taggie O’Hara (Bella Maclean).
Parkinson, dressed like the cool ninja version of school-gate mum (Adidas trainers and a hoodie), is very clear that she’s just an average-looking person, which I find droll because her face on screen is, and always has been, compelling. “We could have quite easily been reduced to the comedy B-plot,” she says. “And I remember thinking: ‘I don’t think that’s what you want.’ You want to say: these two people might look more normal and be less romantic-lead looking – but the love is just as A-list. The love story is just as fervent as Rupert and Taggie’s. The feelings aren’t any less.” Parkinson has had a long working relationship with one of the show’s writers, Laura Wade: “There’s a synergy going on between us born from years of writing and working together.” (In 2018 they did Home, I’m Darling, a stage production in which the central role was written with Parkinson in mind.)
The intensity of her love story with Dyer – the physical tension in their disco dancing scene is fabulous – is a meaningful cultural waypoint. “I’m just a normal 47-year-old woman who has breastfed two girls, and that doesn’t mean I’m not able to represent a sexual being. I feel like the porn generation has gone so far the other way that we’ve forgotten what good sex is about, which is connection, wanting, desire. It’s so simple, isn’t it?”
It also ties us back to the complexity of adapting Cooper in the first place. The era in which these books were set was one where sexual harassment was commonplace and beauty contests were good, clean, not-at-all-sexist fun, organised by people who would cover up a rape to save embarrassment and still consider themselves more or less moral. But the comparison isn’t as simple as “1980s bad, 2020s good”.
“I feel that in Jilly’s books,” Parkinson says, “you absolutely get the sense that women are enjoying the consensual sex they’re having. The emphasis was so much on consent when I was growing up; I didn’t feel as much as I should have done that sex was something I might like doing. There was a feeling for me that if you ever seemed to be enjoying that side of things, you were a slag. For me, doing this job has been a glorious, fairly belated celebration. I didn’t want it to feel shameful, that last scene I have with Danny. I didn’t want to feel apologetic.”
A friend and contemporary of Parkinson’s texted her after watching: That was very much my era. Say no more. “And I thought: ‘God, I think they might have had more fun than me.’ Ironically, it was in many ways a more permissive time.”
The other painfully nostalgic thing about all the love stories in Rivals is that they are “slow-burn romances”, as Parkinson calls them – which is to say, they happened before the internet. “Being in the same room with somebody, smelling their smell, how you feel when you’re around them. I’m too old to have done dating apps. I met my husband [actor Harry Peacock] when I was 25, in that way, in a room.” And yes, she says, Rivals makes you miss “drinking and smoking – I loved doing all that. It’s pressing the fuck-it button. Which I’m really good at.”
The other reason the emotional intensity came as a bit of a surprise is that one thinks of Parkinson, from The IT Crowd on, as a comic actor. She bristles a bit at that binary between comic and serious, remembering the 90s and (what we’re now calling) the sadistic 00s, when it was routine for journalists to ask female actors: “Are women funny?”
“I always found it quite baffling, because my idols were Judi Dench and Maggie Smith and Julie Walters and Victoria Wood; there’s a long tradition of British comedy actors going into drama. And you think: ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s just a question in an interview.’ But actually, it separated me from somebody like Chris O’Dowd, who’s a good friend; we’re both funny in the pub together. I became aware of the difference – a perception of me, a comedy actress, as opposed to him, as just an actor.”
Parkinson has some similarities with Lizzie, such as her self-deprecating warmth: she says her nickname is Part-time Parkinson, because she’s always looking for a holiday, for instance. But perhaps it’s closer to say that Lizzie has just irresistibly become more like Katherine Parkinson, and no exaggeration to say, in her, a new romantic-heroic trope has been created.