Rivals is just the tonic for anyone who might be stressing over RBA rate announcements or re-counts in Wayne County, Michigan. This soapy, eminently bingeable sex-fest is set in 1986 against the backdrop of a rumbustious era of change in independent British television.

Rivals is adapted from the best-selling novel by Dame Jilly Cooper, who serves as the series’ executive producer. A former journalist, Cooper began writing romance novels in the 1970s, becoming famous for a series of 11 books known as ‘The Rutshire Chronicles’. The second volume, Rivals, hit book stands in 1988. It focuses on the lives of British social elites and the shocking largesse of an era where politics and power came under the influence of the newly minted media barons.