Rivals; Bombing Brighton

“There was a feeling, when it was announced that Jilly Cooper’s novel was being adapted for Disney+, that it would automatically be drained of fun. Those fears were unfounded. Watching this show is like drinking the very essence of Cooper, distilled and concentrated. It is a cavalcade of nudity and terrible wigs, an orgy of knowing bad taste. If such a spectrum existed, you would place Rivals between the Carry On movies and Eurotrash. However, it is also incredibly well made.”
Stuart Heritage, The Guardian

“How much you enjoy Rivals will depend on how much of a Jilly Cooper fan you are (I think she is fabulous). But even if you’re not au fait with the books you can tuck in to a lavish series that takes you back to a decade (it is set in 1986) before mobile phones and when people still got steaming drunk at lunchtime. This is a big pink Anglo bubblegum of a production and a splash of retro-escapism. Lord knows we all need a bit of that right now.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“Dispel any fears that Jilly Cooper’s book has been Disney-fied. There are no concessions to the times in which we live. Everyone commits adultery and smokes like a chimney. They hunt and shoot. People tell off-colour jokes and nobody pulls them up on it with a po-faced lecture about human rights. The men are unapologetically macho. And in Campbell-Black, Cooper’s ‘handsomest man in England’, we have a Tory politician you’d actually want to sleep with. This show could do wonders for the Conservative Party.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“It considers how we view violence in asymmetric conflicts and how we can move past it. As for the personalities involved, Patrick Magee proves to be fascinating, but this is more a study of the bombing’s target than its perpetrator. The most telling archive footage is of Thatcher, interviewed hours after the blast and visibly shaken, to the point where she almost seems to forget she is the prime minister.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian

“Whatever you made of Magee, his presence offered a perspective that made this a more thought-provoking documentary than it might otherwise have been.”
James Jackson, The Times

“The remarkable endgame of this sad, sober, open-minded narrative concerned Jo Berry’s pursuit of truth and reconciliation with the man who murdered her father. Patrick Magee, whom police were able to identify and arrest by his missing little finger, can still make flesh creep.”
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph

“For the first hour, this thorough, balanced examination of the bombing, its antecedents and its aftermath, was a gripping historical analysis. The last quarter of an hour took a strange twist. Jo Berry, daughter of the Tory deputy chief whip Sir Anthony Berry, who was one of five people killed, talked about her efforts to understand and forgive Magee, despite his continued insistence that the murders were justified.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“An important, skillfully made piece of oral history. This riveting, even-handed documentary challenged us to make up our own minds.”
Gerard Gilbert, The i