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“Is it really like that?” It was a rainy day in Paris, and an American editor and friend was asking about the HBO series Industry. He had been following the drama, which is set among a group of graduates vying for power at Pierpoint & Co, a prestigious investment bank in the City of London. But his query was less about the machinations of life within the financial sector and more about the sexual proclivities that occupy its staff.
So much sex: Industry, conceived by former bankers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, depicts a licentious den of drug-fuelled hedonism, inappropriate relationships and a work culture in which one is only ever a stone’s throw from a bathroom cubicle in which to shag or do some blow. The editor was intrigued to find out if London’s Square Mile was really so unreconstructed? Of course not, I told him — an opinion formed having never been in an investment bank despite the FT itself being in the City. No one behaves that badly, it’s just the fiction of the show.
Industry hints at the tier of depravity that lurks just beneath the British veneer of respectability. It rips away the pretence that Britain is a society of gentlemen and suggests that its richest and most powerful players are in fact the priapic overlords of moral bankruptcy. This is possibly shocking to those unfamiliar with the country’s mores, but in fact it follows a fairly standard pattern. The same dynamic also charges Disney’s latest offering, an adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s “bonkbuster” Rivals, another drama — albeit cloaked in ’80s fashions — about people behaving badly in the workplace, grasping power and having lots of sex.
Rivals makes turgid drama of the ITV franchise auctions that took place through the 1980s, where competing independent companies made talk shows while fulfilling the broadcast requirements that would ensure they could stay on air. The premise is a tissue-thin backdrop to a socio-sexual drama set around the TV network Corinium, and set in bucolic Rutshire, a fictional corner of England that is forever profiteroles, curtain pelmets and bubble perms.
Rivals has been rapturously received by critics, described as being both compulsive and a total riot. Fans have delighted in its bawdy humour. It makes them all misty-eyed with cocktail-sausage-tinged nostalgia: this show is the kind of cultural offering, they claim, at which the Brits excel.
I remain quite mystified by Rivals. I needed to see only the first two minutes — a manicured red fingernail gripping a dimpled buttock — to decide that it’s among the ugliest things I’ve ever seen. Its lead character, Rupert Campbell-Black (played by Alex Hassell), a show-jumper turned politician, is supposed to be a man of such breathtaking charisma that his mere presence will reduce women to wanton jezebels. Instead, he’s an odd homunculus with a mahogany spray tan whose sexual exploits are so lacking in eroticism that while watching them, I tuned out to check my phone.
Eroticism is never the point, though, with Jilly Cooper, the high priestess of romantic fiction whose greatest talent in describing sexual conquests seems to be in banishing them of any stirrings of desire. No one makes beautiful love in Rutshire; they merely mount each other with the passionless vigour of barnyard beasts. The terminology is pretty sexless also: it’s all “rutting”, “bonking” and giving one a “good seeing-to”.
In Cooper’s universe, some chap pinching your ass passes as seduction. Adultery is standard, and the age of consent a little blurred. I am still scarred by the experience, in tender-hearted adolescence, of reading one of her early novellas — was it Prudence, Octavia or Bella? — in which her female adventurer is described as being “dry as a Scotch egg”. So horrendous was this simile that I’ve long wondered whether Cooper might actually be some sort of crusader for long-term abstinence.
Perhaps it’s a reflection of Cooper’s well-noted passion for the animal kingdom that humans are accorded no more sexual gravitas than horses? Or maybe her own experience of infidelity — her late husband Leo had a long affair with the publisher Sarah Johnson — has coloured the texture of her writing. In Rivals, sexual indiscretions are quick, cursory and without great meaning; everyone is merely at the whim of some primal desire. The truth would otherwise be too painful, and where would be the FUN in that?
Jilly Cooper’s Britain is the world capital of bad sex; part of a long tradition of bawdy bedroom banter where people blaze with carnal appetites. Men are cads and assholes, and seemingly all the more attractive for it. Women are either high-necked nightie-wearing sexless spinsters, or slinky, over made-up slags.
It’s a worldview that has permeated through the ages, encrusted with the loose codes of the upper classes, and enshrined via James Bond, the Carry On franchise, and more recently Saltburn and Industry. Modern sensibilities have tried to curb our affection for smut and scandal, but the laws of entertainment must dictate that for every sweet, kind relationship study such as Heartstopper (on Netflix) must come something more feral and completely unrefined.
Email Jo at [email protected]
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