Rivals’ Rutshire – a place where modern Britain’s brutal divisions disappear in a cloud of sex | Jess Cartner-Morley

For Jilly Cooper devotees – a motley band that unites me with Queen Camilla and Joanna Lumley, Ian Rankin and ex-footballer Tony Adams – it has been the best of times, and the worst of times. (No apologies for the clunky Tale of Two Cities misquote. Jilly was fond of gleefully shoehorning in the odd bit of Dickens, or Shakespeare, or Wordsworth.) The best of times, because the television adaptation of Rivals has shown the world what some of us knew all along, which is that Cooper’s stories are life-affirming and wise and hysterically funny; but the worst of times, when Cooper’s unexpected death last year cut short the late-life renaissance in which she was quite rightly revelling.

The first half of a blissful second season of Rivals comes to a climax this week (puns always intended). Six heavenly hours on the sofa, following the professional rivalries and personal dramas of a hard-drinking bunch of 1980s telly executives as they bomb along Cotswold lanes blowing Silk Cut smoke through the open windows of their Austin Metros, or pogo to Nena’s 99 Red Balloons on sticky pub carpet while knocking back tequila shots. Rivals has reminded us that good television can be fun. A golden age of television has given us some modern masterpieces, but the payoff for artistic quality has been that prestige viewing has become, for the most part, pretty bleak. Adolescence was utterly harrowing. Baby Reindeer was a pretty tough watch. Even The Bear and The Pitt are kind of stressful. Life in Rutshire has gifted us television as it used to be: a naughty, indulgent treat.

The villains are delicious, the heroines adorable, the minor characters full of juice. David Tennant, as the awful Lord Baddingham, eats steak with a vindictive relish that makes Hannibal Lecter look like a vegetarian. Nafessa Williams, playing glamazon American executive Cameron, is as bewitching as she is terrifying, smirking in her Yves Saint Laurent and Azzedine Alaia skirt suits like a high-maintenance assassin. Gary Lamont as gentle Charles Fairburn, tormented by passion for his closeted lover, Gerald, is a life raft of sweet tenderness in the shark pool that is the Corinium TV HQ.

The through-line of Rivals on screen is nostalgia for life before we overcomplicated everything. When wellness wasn’t even a word, and a dented biscuit tin full of custard creams and jaffa cakes was the heart of every kitchen. When a glow-up meant electric blue mascara and most of a bottle of Elnett rather than lip fillers and lash extensions. For bone-rattling cars and deep shagpile carpets, an absurd but essentially benign England of velvet alice bands and The Birdie Song, of eating vol-au-vents and drinking snakebite.

And sex. So much sex. In the shower, under a desk, against antique mirrors, in the stables. Cooper, as her literary agent, Felicity Blunt, said recently, “understood that sex is its own language”. There is grimly funny bad sex as well as hot sex, but – in contrast to the sensationalised kink of Euphoria or the pay-to-play sex of Margo’s Got Money Troubles – bonking, as it must be known in Rutshire, is mostly there for the enjoyment of everyone involved. There is an admirably equal-opportunities nudity policy on screen, with at least as many thrusting bottoms as bouncing boobs. And the best sex – the swimming pool scene, which matches Leo and Claire making eyes at each other through the fish tank in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet for unabashed feels – is had not by any of the series’ pin-ups, but by Danny Dyer’s bashful rough diamond Freddie and his downtrodden, cardi-wearing middle-aged lover, Lizzie.

Rivals reminds us that while class and money have always been thorny, there was a time – not all that long ago – when inequality and class division in Britain meant Freddie’s wife, Valerie, being sniggered at by the poshos for saying dessert instead of pudding, rather than the 157 richest people in the country having wealth equivalent to 22% of GDP, as was outlined by the Equality Trust this week. In Rutshire, posh people are ridiculous (“my name is Muffy, short for Caroline”). And not even all that rich compared with modern Britain of the haves, the have-nots and the have-yachts. Hands up, Guardian reader, if you were secretly rooting for dastardly shagger and world-class charmer Rupert Campbell-Black to retain his seat as a Tory MP, in episode 3 of this series. Yeah, me too, and I work here. Here in the Jillyverse, the brutal divisions of modern life disappear in a puff of cigar smoke. It is a far, far better place we go to, when we go to Rutshire.