This tumescent adaptation of Jilly Cooper ’s 1980s bonkbuster from Disney + is stuffed with pneumatic talent and opens with a statement of intent. The first thing we see are the pumping buttocks of Alex Hassell’s Rupert Campbell-Black, caddish sexpot showjumper-turned-Thatcherite MP, as he initiates a female journalist into the mile-high club in Concorde’s lavatory. The heavy-breathing guitar licks of Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love ramp up as they break the sound barrier.
Bang! Boom! We only see Rupert’s varnished-looking face once he starts trading insults with media mogul Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) whose lips are usually wrapped around a Freudian cigar. And then we see – well, everything – as Rupert is surprised while playing naked tennis with another MP’s mistress-turned wife, by doe-eyed, dyslexic, 20-year-old chef Taggie (Sex Education’s Bella Maclean). Taggie is the daughter of tough interviewer Declan O’Hara (angry, hairy Aidan Turner ), hired by Tony as a righteous figleaf to help him retain his TV franchise, and soon enlisted in his rivalry with Rupert.
Do try to keep up. Anyway, as I said: naked tennis. In the 80s Cooper was considered raunchy but the sex in her books – like the class-signifiers of houses and hunts – was primarily silly, absurd.
Lead writer Dominic Treadwell-Collins and director Elliott Hegarty clearly understand this. Their TV version is suffused with affection for Cooper and for the decade that was once a byword for .