Alex Hassell and Bella MacLean can’t compete with the raw sex appeal of Rivals’ real star — The Cotswolds
Bella MacLean and Alex Hassell speak to Meg Walters about season two of Rivals and the sex appeal of the Cotswolds.
Has anything on television ever been sexier than Rivals? The show, inspired by Dame Jilly Cooper’s 1988 romp of the same name, sees the scheming Sir Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) face off against left-leaning journalist Declan O’Hara, infamous womaniser and MP Sir Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) and new money tech-wizz Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer) over the rights for the south-west ITV franchise. In between the political manoeuvrings, everyone is in love with the wrong person and everyone is having lots and lots of affairs. Series two, which debuts today, picks up midway through the novel, which is set in the fictional county of Rutshire, but which is based on, and filmed in, the Cotswolds.
‘I had no relationship with the Cotswolds before coming on board,’ Alex says when I meet him and Bella MacLean — who plays his wide-eyed, but spunky love interest, Taggie — at a hotel in London. ‘I guess I have more of a relationship with it now. It's such a beautiful place, isn't it?’
‘I love how we're talking about it like it's a person,’ says Bella, laughing, before joking that her ‘relationship’ with the Cotswolds ‘is sort of tumultuous and deeply sexual.’ Bella might be joking, but the show’s setting really is a vital character, albeit one that doesn’t speak — and it is a very sexually-charged iteration of the British countryside.
If you've seen series one, you'll already be well aware of Rivals’ on-screen sex appeal. There are chiseled polo players with megawatt smiles and glistening ponies galloping around in slow-motion; there’s naked tennis, skinny dipping in the pool and hedonistic house parties, boozy hunt balls, lavish garden parties and, of course, countless torrid affairs. Much of it plays out to the soundtrack of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance.
It might seem like the stuff of fantasy — after all, the Cotswolds tend to conjure up visions of honey-stone cottages, rolling hills and National Trust tea rooms — but Rivals is very much rooted in reality.
Forty years ago, the Cotswolds was teeming with the country's elite — and they really liked to party. Cooper, who moved from Yorkshire to a 14th century manor house in Gloucestershire, in 1982, was a firsthand witness. ‘Everybody was having sex with everybody, I think,’ she once told The Irish Times, adding, ‘it was such a fun time.’
The Guardian gave season two five stars: 'If I could give this exquisite bonkbuster 10,000 stars, I would'.
Alex was among those who was surprised to learn that the sexed-up party land he helped depict in the show wasn’t the stuff of fantasy. ‘We'd end up having chats with lots of the people whose houses we were filming in,’ he says, ‘and they often would be friends of Cooper's, funnily enough.’ If walls could talk…
In series two, Rupert and Taggie’s relationship reaches a tipping point at an elaborate (and drunken) hunt ball. ‘I don't think it's ruining anything, particularly, to say that ours [hunt ball] is pretty risqué and raunchy,’ says Alex. ‘And apparently it was absolutely nothing compared to what actually would happen. So, I think [Rivals] is fairly accurate — if not a little bit watered down!’
Daring to write about this elite world and their wild pursuits was a bold move on Cooper’s part. Plenty took offence. ‘A lot of people liked it very much,’ she once told The Guardian of Riders, a book that was published before Rivals. But, she added, 'the editor of Horse and Hound said it was a disgusting book’.
Cooper’s saving grace — and the real reason her books were so popular — was the fact that behind the sex you’d find characters with three-dimensional personalities. As Rupert and Taggie, Alex and Bella are the show’s beating heart — the couple who ground the wild sexiness of it all in real emotion. Their unexpected and somewhat taboo (there’s a 16-year age difference) romance is surprisingly sweet and tender.
'There is a kind of a Darcy-Lizzie Bennett, [or a] Rochester [thing going on],' Alex says of the relationship. '[Romance tropes] are something that Cooper seemed to be playing with: It's a countryside story – [there are] these massive manor houses — yet transplanting it into the 1980s and, you know, adding sort of the mores of the 80s — and sex. It's a really interesting thing to do.'
Despite his 'scandalous' reputation, Rupert is 'lovely to his dogs', according to the late Dame Jilly Cooper.
The rolling hills, rambling ancient manor houses, microcosmic social world and innate allure of all of that privacy feels very conducive to a Jane Austen-esque romance. Afterall, Cooper was often referred to as the 'Jane Austen of her time'. A sexy update on the classic romance was just what the 1980s called for and, it seems, it's what we're all hankering for now, too. The new adaptation has been something of a shock hit, with season one reaching more than 20 million viewers, becoming the best performing new UK drama of 2024.
Perhaps the popularity of this adaptation hints at a return to the Cotswolds’ 1980s heyday? It has, of course, always been popular, but recent events have accelerated demand and changed who was buying and visiting. When series one was released in 2024, the countryside was still riding its Covid-induced popularity wave, during which time many of the country’s biggest names decided to hunker down there. Lottie Moss spent her Lockdown in big sister Kate’s Cotswolds manor; the Beckhams shared countless photographs of their Cotswolds farmhouse, garden and growing menagerie; Boris and Carrie Johnson celebrated their 2022 marriage with a festival-style party at Daylesford House. Post-Covid, countless celebrities have been lured away from big cities and the USA, including Liam Gallagher, Ellen DeGeneres, James Blunt, and Lily Allen. Even Beyoncé and Jay-Z are reportedly looking to buy.
Will they, won't they?
The release of Plum Sykes’s semi-fictional 'Wives Like Us' — the author's sort of satirical take on life in the Cotswolds that reads like a death knell to normalcy — also in 2024, compounded things.
Swathes of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire have, cleverly, been quietly updating things. There are new private doctor services, and household staffing and security agencies, and hotels and private members’ clubs (e.g Estelle Manor and the ever-growing Daylesford empire).
With the Cotswolds once again a vibrant playground for the wealthy, Rivals really is the rural romp and romance we need.
