"It's a period piece like Dickens"
David Tennant plays Lord Tony Baddingham
Disney
- Caroline Frost
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What was the appeal of Rivals?
Before I’d even opened the script, my wife Georgia saw the title and told me I was going to be in it, so any element of choice was taken away from me. She had quite a visceral reaction to it and has been a champion of the whole thing.
Did a little part of you want to play Rupert Campbell-Black?
It didn’t really matter who I played. But I couldn’t compete with Alex for Rupert. I think Lord Tony Baddingham is a more natural fit for me.
Tony is the resident baddie. Do you have any sympathy for him?
He doesn’t see it that way, he’s just doing what he needs to do in order to survive. Objectively, I can see that some of the things he does aren’t particularly morally robust. It’s all Daddy issues. I don’t think Tony is difficult to make sense of, he’s very plausible. The characters all have drama to them, but they’re nuanced and make sense. You’re not struggling to join the dots, they’re well-crafted and that’s why Jilly’s books have survived. There is a quality in this work that makes it timeless.
Would these characters be believable in a more modern setting?
No, they are entrenched in the politics and mores of that era. It was such a specific moment in time – all that excess; Margaret Thatcher saying there was “no such thing as society”. It changed how people were allowed to think and certain people grabbed it, ran with it and wallowed in it. These characters all swim in that swamp.
The big battle in Rivals is to win a TV franchise. Is the story still relevant?
It’s not something we really have an understanding of now. When I first read the scripts, I thought, “Are the stakes of this going to make sense?” But it doesn’t matter what they’re competing over, it’s just who they are and that’s what drives them and that feels very alive and human.
What kind of portrait of 1980s England do we see in Rivals?
Jilly Cooper is a great chronicler of the human condition. It’s a period piece like a Dickens drama. You can marvel at how different some things were and how similar other things were. That’s part of the joy.
What did you love most about the 1980s?
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I’ve loved rediscovering the music. I was a teenager during those years, so there was a lot of music it wasn’t cool to like. But some of these tunes are banging.
Authors
Caroline Frost
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