The TV drama doesn’t shy away from the worst aspects of the Thatcher era. But this version of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster also captures the lust, laughter and late-night parties
There is no watching Rivals, the Disney+ adaptation of the Jilly Cooper classic, and pretending the 80s weren’t like that. The poisonous, unabashed homophobia of Tory politics; the hushed-up rapes, the sexual exploitation, the abuse of power, the objectification. Not to mention the inequality, the snobbery, the vulgar excess, the truly nauseating deference to aristocracy – a craven surrender to their innate superiority – and the racism and misogynoir. There is a highly plausible depiction of just how hard a black woman had to fight to exist and to be seen, even by the characters who are meant to be right-on. There is no denying any of it. So why does this high-camp, warts-and-all frolic through the 80s make me feel so nostalgic? Is it just because I had forgotten how much I liked Wham!?
No, it is not just the Wham!. It’s not even just for the bam, thank you ma’am, but let’s start there.
The bonkbuster: its history, tenets and internal logic
Lolz, not really. It would be my greatest delight to trace the arc of Cooper’s approach to sex, from the incredibly horny but socially constrained heroines of her earliest novels (1977’s Octavia, 1978’s Imogen) through to Rivals (1988) – the middle and probably the pearl of the Rutshire Chronicles – and beyond, but we don’t have time.
To summarise: the characters love shagging. Not just the men. There are predatory, exploitative, deceitful shaggers, male and female, and there are lusty, carefree shaggers overflowing with life force, same proviso, and the sexual morality is very simple: if both people are really into it, this is the best thing that ever happened; deal with the fallout later. The worldview is reflexively consensual, because it centres pleasure and sometimes (but not always) love.
Cooper doesn’t call herself a feminist, which has led some people to conclude that sex positivity is the opposite of feminism. She has also made a few inconsistent remarks about the #MeToo movement (briefly, that it diminished men, but also that it was good for women, sharing her own #MeToo story), which has led some to conclude that she and, by extension, her oeuvre (and even era) didn’t criticise predatory or exploitative behaviour enough.
But the 80s saw a lot of hot contest around sex, in which feminists weren’t operating in a bell jar, separate from the rest of society; rather, we were having the same conversation as everyone else, just more articulately. There was an anti-pornography movement and a sex-positive one – and they fought, a lot, along the same lines as in the debates of the 60s and 70s: were women the victims of men’s sexual aggression or the agents of their own sexual destiny?
The anti-pornography position was set out in 1980, when the National Organization for Women described the “big four” exploitations – pederasty, pornography, sadomasochism and public sex. That rhetorical manoeuvre, rolling kink and pornography in with the obvious injustice of paedophilia, then randomly sprinkling public sex on top, is a classic bad-faith argument.
Sex-positive feminism sometimes found itself boxed into a corner, but it never just rolled over. It would continue to insist that sex was great, even pending a consensus (that never arrived) on pornography. And it saw no contradiction in castigating sexual violence and celebrating sex, because there isn’t one. While this may, of course, be a coincidence, the numbers show that everyone got laid a lot more in the 80s.
Drinking in the mornings, smoking in the bath: debauchery and self-actualisation
Whether you always have a fat cigar on the go (David Tennant as Lord Baddingham) or a fag dangling from your mouth so naturally that you have probably forgotten it’s there (Aidan Turner and Danny Dyer’s characters); whether you are smoking in a plane (Annabel Scholey), on a train (Katherine Parkinson) or in an automobile (everyone), if anyone could make smoking look cool, it’s these people. But the data is in, children. I’m not going to make the case that the 80s were great because we could smoke without realising it was bad for you.
Nor could I stand up in court and argue the difference between a heavy drinker and an alcoholic, which Rivals takes as 101, the very nursery slopes of booze taxonomy. Knowing what we know now about the ills of alcohol, these levels of consumption seem untenable. A stiff drink after a difficult meeting; a raid on a rival’s whisky stash, just to make a point; a half bottle of whisky upon receipt of bad news; a bottle of fizz instead of tea, to welcome a neighbour; a liquid lunch that leaves you staggering. In the land of Rivals, this is all natural, zesty, human appetite, a Jungian libido of which only a prig or a cynic would disapprove.
Run the numbers on how many units that is, laugh if you like, but admit it: this world – where no one goes to the gym, except one character made of evil; where no one plays tennis except naked; where no one, but no one, is getting up at 5am to start their winter arc; where wellness is not a thing; and where self-discipline is not even a refuge of the boring, but simply never mentioned – was great.
At least, it was great on a nostalgic fantasy level. This was a world in which the individual didn’t have all, or indeed any, of the answers. Allied to that, it was a world in which people hung out, went to parties, stayed late. Can you imagine anyone in a Cooper novel who had to get up early? They would be a laughing stock. Even Nafessa Williams as Cameron Cook, who introduces a US work ethic to the lolling Cotswold gentleman-amateurs – when she says she has to work, she means with a hangover, around brunch time, after scrambled eggs.
From low-carb diets to stone-washed denim: was the fat-shaming for real?
If you saw a wife in a modern drama, however satirical, who wouldn’t allow her husband a potato, or a husband whose lip curled in disgust at the sight of his own (not even fat!) wife in underwear, you would say: this isn’t a relationship; this is more like a jailer-inmate scenario. Interspousal snack-policing in Rivals is so intense that it drives two characters into one another’s arms in – no spoilers, I promise – the most exquisite love story of the book.
The 80s were different: there was no compunction about ridiculing fatness, no taboo around valorising thinness. “Moments on the lips, for ever on the hips”, “you can never be too rich or too thin” – people had these supposed aphorisms as fridge magnets. Worse was women’s magazines advising readers to stick a picture of yourself, fat, on your fridge door to discourage … eating?
This doesn’t work, by the way. My friend’s mum used to cook with tape over her mouth. Another friend’s mum used to douse the bin with washing-up liquid, in case she “accidentally” picked out leftovers and ate them. While Rosemary Conley was devising her hip-and-thigh diet, Callan Pinckney was inventing Callanetics, which opened, in 1984, with a photo of where your legs should meet if you were thin enough (ankles, mid-calf, knees, mid-thigh and nowhere else). So, yes, fat-shaming was a thing.
Yet watching the parade of denim in Rivals, thinking how unflattering it all is – good grief, the dungarees, so formless, you can just about make out that someone inside them is alive – I realised that “unflattering” wasn’t it. The word I was looking for was “loose”. Fashion in the 80s was one long mixed message, from the Amish-adjacent modesty of a Laura Ashley dress to the the boob tube, but it didn’t have “looking thin” as its first precept. Nobody ever put on a puffball skirt, or shoulder pads, or a random giant bow, to accentuate how little space they were taking up. All the accent was on making a splash.
The modern normal is that you still have to be incredibly thin, but you have to prove it with the tightest denim ever. Not even men are exempt any more from the cult of thinness – and everyone has to pretend they never think about it. Is that progress?
The freedom of un-tech
There were things that used to be possible, before the worldwide wondernet. You might have heard of someone, but not been completely sure what they looked like. Someone could steal a set of photographs and you wouldn’t have a backup; that would be you, done – no photographs. There was a time before surveillance, before infinite record-keeping; there was a time when discovery wasn’t instant, but needed legwork. That time felt smaller, but also freer.
Also, guys – the tech innovations of the 80s were real. Satellite TV unlocked an instantaneous broadcast. Fax machines, Walkmans, laser printers, these all allowed you to do something you couldn’t previously do. Contrast the technological leap between the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 13. That didn’t give you anything you wanted. It just left you status-chasing a version of what you already had.
One more thing
There was a spirit of optimism in the 80s, iterated in Rivals by sex and a lust for commerce, but discernible in real life also. This makes no sense: Thatcherite economics had cast millions into poverty and unemployment, the public realm was degraded by privatisation and underinvestment, the nuclear threat was immense and pervasive. It is unbelievable how many pop songs, dramas, children’s books, in the 80s were explicitly about the nuclear holocaust. It was a neurotic life and I remember it viscerally. Even though, in retrospect, it was less threatening than the climate crisis – being just men pushing buttons, rather than whole systems failures decades in the making – it didn’t feel at the time like anything less than ultimate jeopardy.
Yet the optimism persisted; the hedonism persisted. We have been at the brink of disaster before, without anything like our present state of collective despair – so what the hell has happened? Have the amassed forces of capital poisoned the information well with hopelessness? Was it always the young who brought the optimism to the party – and a mistake, therefore, not to invite them? (Society isn’t, after all, terribly welcoming to the younger generations; all we do is load them with debt, exclude them from housing and then call them snowflakes.) Or is the culprit something we are going to discover in years to come, like “microplastics make you sad”? I couldn’t possibly adjudicate without sounding like a crank.
Also, I miss vol-au-vents.