The House | ‘Delicious’: Samantha Niblett on why TV drama ‘Rivals’ is no guilty pleasure

Bella Maclean as Taggie O’Hara and Alex Hassell as Conservative MP, Rupert Campbell-Black | Image courtesy of Disney+

5 min read7 min

Bingeing the first four episodes of Season Two of Rivals should feel like a guilty pleasure. But there is zero guilt here.

It is exactly what you want it to be: outrageously good television. It sells aspiration and a life of privilege out of reach of most people – the idyllic Cotswolds setting, private helicopters, influential TV executives and, yes, politicians. It delivers a stellar lineup of some of Britain’s finest actors with dialogue that is sharp, wicked and gloriously alive. It is sexy and scandalous and funny and completely addictive. I love it.

But beyond the crisp shirts being unbuttoned, the hot bodies and the devastating one-liners, this is a show about what happens to human beings when sex sits at the centre of so much in our lives yet is never spoken about openly. Or worse, when it is spoken about in ways that create shame, and where sex becomes a weapon used to control.

Jilly Cooper’s greatest gift was always her refusal to be ashamed of desire

The show is set in the 1980s, with Section 28 looming on the horizon: that vile piece of legislation that would make it illegal for schools to “promote” homosexuality; which told an entire generation of gay children their love was not fit to be spoken of. In Rivals S2, we watch wannabe Tory MP Gerald Middleton, a gay man, feel he has no choice but to marry a woman and perform as a straight man in order to win a seat. It is devastating, not least because his real and true love is the adorable Charles Fairburn – and what about Caroline “Muffy” Hampshire, the woman tricked into marriage?

I meet young people today figuring out who they are without adequate support, without language, without anyone sitting them down and saying simply: all of this is normal and you have nothing to be ashamed of.

Then there is the storyline that made my heart hurt. Daysee Butler, raped in Season One by the vile Reverend Fergus Penny but silenced by Lord Baddingham, a man who chose his own power over justice. What is so unbearable about the way Rivals tells her story is not just the act itself but the way shame is somehow shifted onto Daysee. I hope the rest of Season Two sees her get the revenge, if not the justice, she deserves. Because we all know how abysmal the conviction rate for rapists remains. Removing the shame and silence around sex would see men like Penny have far fewer shadows in which to thrive.

The show also gives us the consensual, beautiful, but agonising love of Lizzie Vereker and Freddie Jones, two people who no longer feel desired by their respective spouses and who fall, helplessly, for each other. The deep connection they share, amplified by physical intimacy, leaves them consumed by guilt. They are a reminder of the quiet but vital role that desire and sex play in keeping long-term relationships alive.

It’s something equally absent from the life of the suave, loveable and deeply troubled Rupert Campbell-Black, a Tory minister exposed for a string of sexual encounters and publicly destroyed for it. Hedonistic and decadent he may be, but he is also deeply lonely. And that loneliness turns my mind to the young men being recruited into the manosphere every single day. Their journey there does not begin with hatred. It begins with loneliness, shame and silence.

That silence needs breaking. That void needs filling with education, honesty and open conversation.

In the 1980s, we did not talk about sex because we were embarrassed. In 2026, we are still embarrassed even though we have convinced ourselves the job is done – and we still do not talk about it enough. It is not done. The ignorance, the shame, the violence, the loneliness: it is all still here, as sinister and damaging as it ever was.

Author Jilly Cooper’s fingerprints are on every inch of this production, and her greatest gift was always her refusal to be ashamed of desire. She thought pleasure was human and funny and worth celebrating. I agree with her completely. A nation that learns to talk about sex honestly, in schools, in homes, in GP surgeries, online, across a whole lifetime, will be a nation with less violence, less shame, less loneliness, and far more genuine human happiness.

Rivals is brilliant television. Watch it. And then let’s talk about why it still feels so radical.

Samantha Niblett is Labour MP for South Derbyshire

Rivals: Season 2

Directed by: Elliot Hegarty, Jamie J Johnson & Dee Koppang O’Leary

Broadcaster: Disney+