You can’t beat a farce. By Shannon Connellan on May 15, 2026
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Rivals is back, in all its steamy, bonkbusting glory, and it just pulled off one of the classics of comedy: the seemingly one-take farce.
The late Dame Jilly Cooper’s beloved and saucy ’80s Rutshire Chronicles novels made for one of the very best British TV shows of 2024, adapted by Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Laura Wade. In Season 2, the shoulder-padded, aristocratic residents of the Cotswolds are still finding themselves in various entanglements, including a scene that makes a Pink Panther-worthy marvel out of closed doors and near misses.
Though the scene was filmed in a single take, there’s a few visible cuts from editor Vicky Tooms for dramatic effect. However, it presents as one chaotic evening in real time.
One-shot takes are becoming more ambitious on TV, with the likes of Adolescence’s Philip Barantini, The Haunting of Hill House’s Mike Flanagan, and The Bear’s Christopher Storer setting that bar sky-high with one-take marvels within kitchens and funeral parlours and even across suburbs. But using a version of the format for a comical farce in the middle of a raunchy ’80s comedy? Brilliant.
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In Rivals Season 2, episode 2, TV presenter Sarah Stratton (Emily Atack) and her Tory MP husband Paul (Rufus Jones) are throwing a dinner party for political reasons, inviting the bigwigs of the Corinium TV station, where Sarah works. Paul is losing local election campaign coverage to his political rival, the dashing Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell). So, he springs a fully hosted event on Sarah, who frankly prefers microwaving entire dinners and has enough on her plate, thank you very much.
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Alas, it’s on. An ’80s dinner party with all the trimmings, secretly cooked in the kitchen by chef Taggie O’Hara (Bella Maclean). It’s a meticulously choreographed, precisely timed affair of bitchy comments overheard, trysts revealed, withheld farts unleashed, and forbidden lovers thrust into close quarters. The 10-minute scene, directed by Elliot Hegarty and shot by director of photography John Lynch and series camera operator Justin Hawkins, is a whirlwind of characters popping in and out of the pantry, cupboards, a stairwell, and the kitchen vestibule.
A few details you’ll need to know:
1. Paul and their guests from Corinium can’t know Taggie, not Sarah, cooked the meal — in fact, Taggie can’t be seen at all. Why? Taggie is aligned with Corinium’s rival TV production company Venturer, which is headed by her father Declan (Aidan Turner), businessman Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer), and Rupert Campbell-Black, the man Taggie is in love with but cannot have.
2. Taggie has to make Paul’s favourite beef daube from The White Elephant in Painswick and ruins it with too much salt. Rupert has a fix but he’ll have to deliver it undetected and hide the evidence.
3. Sarah is pregnant, with extramarital affairs complicating the possibilities of paternity — it could be her husband Paul’s child, or it could belong to Corinium managing director Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), or Rupert, or perhaps TV presenter James Vereker (Oliver Chris), all of whom are in attendance at the dinner party.
“It was done in one take. We blocked out a couple of weeks to film it, but we did it in a day and a half — not showing off,” Atack told a Rivals screening audience in London.
“Shout out to Justin [Hawkins] and John Lynch and everyone involved in that scene. It literally took a village to do that. And even though it was my character’s dinner party scene, I was held up by absolutely every single amazing cast member. It was a really surreal moment in my life. I’ve never done a scene like that, ever…Adrenaline’s so high, everyone’s just feeding off each other’s energies.
“You cannot put a foot wrong, though — then it all crumbles down.”
Hawkins and Lynch essentially stay on Atack or Maclean for the entire scene, as Sarah welcomes and gets rid of characters from her kitchen, tends her guests’ drink needs, and delivers trays of Taggie-made trout mousse to her guests. Meanwhile, Taggie spends the scene covering up both her bot