Tone is a vital ingredient of a TV show but one of the hardest to define. And as far as tonal tightropes go, adapting a Jilly Cooper “bonkbuster” for a modern audience is one of the great high-wire writing acts of recent times.

Turning a TV franchise tussle into a gripping battle of fragile (male) egos, Rivals is both a riotous celebration of the 1980s and a depiction of disturbingly backwards sexual politics.

So how do you faithfully adapt such an outrageously fun social comedy, and do it without making light of its social ills? Such questions beg for a companion podcast. Thankfully, the official Rivals one is unlike the fawning, superficial fare typical of the genre.

Not that the host, Pandora Sykes, isn’t clearly a huge fan of the series. But Sykes previously presented Unreal, a brilliant 10-part “critical history” of reality TV, and here she strikes a similarly assured balance between asking the big questions and revelling in the delicious melodrama.

Right off the bat, she asks writer and executive producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins about the challenges of updating Rivals, which leads to a revealing anecdote from the writers room. The scene where local lothario and MP Rupert Campbell-Black gropes Taggie, his new neighbour and love interest, while she serves him dinner, apparently sparked a lot of debate. Some of the younger writers were worried that viewers wouldn’t be able to believe in their subsequent love story.

But Treadwell-Collins affirms Sykes’ view that it’s an important “comment on the 80s” and also on Rupert’s privilege. The virtue of adapting Rivals now, he concludes, is that we can treat it like a period piece: simultaneously “celebrating bits” of the 1980s while “judging” others.

But forget all the high-minded analysis, it’s just nice to be let in on all the fun. From the champagne-fuelled writers’ retreat to the actors’ endless spray-tans and “fits of giggles” on set, every part of the production sounds like it could be a scene straight out of Rutshire.

Having said that, some of the funniest insights come from the two honorary Rivals fans who bookend each episode: the comedian Sindhu Vee and the journalist Kat Brown.

As well as the essential breakdown of all the “equal opportunities nudity” and “aggressively 80s haircuts”, Vee is hilarious when discussing the show’s uniquely English portrayal of sex: slightly eccentric and neither prudish nor laissez-faire.

“If you showed Rivals to a Scandinavian,” she says, “they’d be, like: ‘What is this? This is, like, comical?’ And if you showed it to a French person, they’d be, like: ‘Yes, everyone’s having an affair – what’s your point?’”

In one word, Vee then manages to sum up not just the ineffable tone of the series but the ethos of an entire country: “It’s a little bit wahey!”