You should watch Rivals - but not with your kids

This isn't the Disney you thought you knew. It's the 80s you'd forgotten about: bonking, boozing and bangers. And just like the 80s it's great fun

“Please tell me you didn’t do that!” my 22-year-old son says as we watched more or less the entire cast dance to The Birdie Song in the opening episode of Rivals.

“Yes, yes we did,” I replied, wondering how this was possible. What had we been thinking? Dancing and making the little ‘cheep cheep’ motion with our hands while singing along: “With a little bit of this and a little bit of that and shake your bum, la la la la…”. Good lord.

“Please tell me you didn’t watch Rivals with your kid!” my old schoolfriend yells as at me as I recount the story.

“Yes, yes we did,” I replied.

“Blimey,” she says. Blimey indeed. Rivals may be on the Disney channel, but this isn’t The Little Mermaid or The Mandalorian. This is a full-on riot of bonking, drugs, booze, shoulder pads and brilliant pop songs you’d forgotten you loved. And absolutely marvellous it is too.

I didn’t read the Jilly Cooper bonkbuster the show is based on – “You wouldn’t have watched it with your kids if you had,” my friend unhelpfully points out – so I can’t comment on whether or not Disney (Disney!!) has captured the spirit of the book. But it has captured something of the spirit of the 80s.

“I think I’d have loved the 80s,” my son says a little later.

“It wasn’t all like this,” I reply as episode one ends with a medley of characters bonking away merrily. And as I do so I’m thinking of the miners’ strike, the Poll Tax, Mrs Thatch, and of Threads and the threat of nuclear war, of having only four television channels and just about anything to avoid thinking about bonking, while I’m sitting watching people bonking with my son sitting about five feet away.

But later I reconsider. It was actually a lot like that. As a teenager at a co-educational boarding school during the period in which Rivals is set, I spent much of the late 80s trying to engage in the activity we’ve just seen on the screen: drinking and bonking. (Although not drugs, because I was a dedicated follower of Zammo: Just Say No.)

Just how much drinking and bonking there was at minor public schools in the West Country is obviously a matter of perspective. As far as the school was concerned: altogether too much. As far as many of its residents were concerned: not nearly enough. The bottle of Malibu that our Californian brought back at the beginning of each term lasted barely a week, and getting a bottle of Thunderbird from the local Spar was an exercise fraught with danger.

The school also employed a “six inch rule” – seriously, you couldn’t make this up – and the playing fields were patrolled by vigilant staff members trying, unsuccessfully for the most part, to ensure that moral corruption stayed safely within the pages of scurrilous novels.

“I didn’t do any work,” my friend wistfully recalls. “But I had a lot of fun.”  

Yes, a lot of fun. Wham! And neon socks and Frankie Says T-Shirts, and Diamond White, and school discos, and £5 fines for smoking. It was sneaking about on rugby fields for a kiss and a fumble, jumping up and down on the rooves of marquees, clandestine trips to Chambers and above all the constant need to amuse ourselves because there was no social media and there was never anything good on the telly.

And – the threat of nuclear oblivion and the scarcity of coconut-based liquor apart –  it was absolutely marvelous.

When I tell people I went to a boarding school – and in particular when I show them pictures of the school with its grand façade and manicured playing fields – they tend to think of, and ask about, Hogwarts. But it wasn’t like Hogwarts. Nobody there was fighting the last battle between good and evil. It was like Rutshire. We were mostly just enjoying ourselves and each other.

“Do kids still say ‘getting off with’?” my friend asks later as we discuss the extent to which the habits of teenagers have changed since the arrival of the mobile phone and TikTok.

“I hope so,” I reply. And I do. And I hope they’re doing it too, because god knows it was, as she said, a lot of fun. And as the return of the Cold War looms, there’s nothing like it for a bit of a distraction therapy.