Was television really like that in the 1980s? That was the question from a thirtysomething producer, asked a little enviously perhaps, after seeing Rivals. “All that sex, drinking and smoking?” Yes, it absolutely was.

The raunchy Disney+ series is based faithfully on Jilly Cooper’s 1988 “bonkbuster”, one of the Rutshire Chronicles, set in a county inspired by the Cotswolds. Life here is dominated by rutting, closely followed by smoking, drinking and feuding.

Aside from abundant fornication and adultery (more on that later), for Television readers the interest may be the plot. It centres on a vicious ITV franchise battle between two companies slugging it out for an unfeasibly large area of central and southern England. For younger readers, ITV was not, as now, a single company, but divided into regions, each served by a standalone operator (except London, which had two: weekday and weekend). The franchises – monopolies awarded by the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) – were hugely profitable and thus hard fought for. In the famous phrase of Roy Thomson, the founding Chairman of Scottish Television, they were a “licence to print money”.

This was the big attraction for Dominic Treadwell-Collins, Rivals’ executive producer and Chief Creative Officer of Happy Prince (part of ITV Studios), which made the show. “Reading Rivals as a young adult, it opened my eyes to the sexy, powerful and at times cut-throat and ruthless world of independent TV in the 80s,” he says. “We thought the high stakes – which seem so alien to us now – would intrigue audiences unfamiliar with the industry during this period.”

In fact, by 1986, when Rivals is set, the stakes were about to get even higher. The old system of the IBA simply assessing the franchise bids – as portrayed in the show – would soon be scrapped. Sarah Thane, then a young IBA regional officer in 

Norwich and later Head of Public Affairs, says: “I could already sense how anachronistic and paternalistic the system was. I’d be sitting there with a seasoned programme controller who had way more experience than me, telling him what he should be doing to meet their franchise terms. I could see how the wind was blowing.”

Soon afterwards, the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, ordered that franchises should be auctioned off to the highest bidders – a handy revenue raiser. That provoked a noisy resistance campaign, and the system was eventually modified to require bidders to also meet a quality threshold and have a sound business plan.

In Rivals, the warring parties are led by the nominatively-determined Lord Baddingham (David Tennant) and ex-showjumper-turned-Tory MP Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell). The plot is littered with underhand tactics, including poaching key staff and stealing bid documents to skewer the opposition. Baddingham sums it up crisply: “Revenge is a dish best served on television.”

Campbell-Black was, according to Cooper, partly inspired by Andrew Parker Bowles, the current Queen’s first husband. TV executives with long memories say Baddingham could have been based on several ITV bosses with reputations for flamboyance and skullduggery. Chief among the candidates is Peter Cadbury, the uber-wealthy, thrice-married, buccaneering boss of Westward Television, covering Devon and Cornwall, who died in 2006.

Like Baddingham, Cadbury was a paradoxical character. “He had his own plane and would fly down to Plymouth,” recalls former top executive David Lowen, then Westward’s Head of News. “After the regional news programme, we were all instructed to go to the bar, where he would serve copious amounts of champagne. He’d laugh and hug everyone, then disappear.”

Cadbury’s Guardian obituary noted, however: “He was blunt to the point of rudeness, picking quarrels throughout his life with policeman, politicians, neighbours and motorists who fell foul of his splendid cars.”

There were rumours, without evidence, that Cadbury used private detectives to spy on rivals. Lowen says he almost certainly adopted a common practice of anonymously setting up a shadow bidding company to flush out or deter the opposition. “Quite often, there would be a fake licence bid put up or partly funded by the incumbent licensee. If you’ve got an arm’s-length organisation gathering information for you, it’s like having a private detective.”

In 1991, under the new auction system, dirty tricks still abounded. Greg Dyke, then Chief Executive of London Weekend Television, recalls: “We used to sweep the meeting room for bugs when we discussed the bid. There was a lot of excitement one day because they found a stray cable, but I think someone had put it there as a joke.”

Dyke was deadly serious, though, about gathering his own information. “I spent two weeks finding out as much as I could about the bidding against us, and I concluded that they were not going to pass the quality threshold. “I talked to people who had been offered the job of Chief Executive, so I knew that their financial structure wasn’t strong enough. We therefore assumed their programme bid wasn’t either.”

Dyke remains coy about his other methods but his calculations were spot-on. LWT kept its franchise despite bidding far less than its rival, which failed on both counts.

Central TV, based in Birmingham, ran the smartest franchise war. “They did all sorts of intelligence work,” says Dyke. “They went around and signed up every independent producer in their region exclusively, guaranteeing them production deals, so that no one else could do it.” It allowed Central to bid a mere £2,000 and win by default.

The pervading theme of Rivals – worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy – is duplicity and betrayal, and it’s not wrong. Talent-poaching was common: challengers aimed to lure top creatives from incumbent companies with lucrative job offers. Some hedged their bets by secretly allowing their names to be put in the rival’s “brown envelope”, for the IBA’s eyes only, never to be revealed if the bid failed.

“It was a by-product of the system,” remembers Thane. “The competing consortiums were obviously desperate to show they had first-rate talent to have a chance of making a credible bid, and there wasn’t a limitless supply. It wasn’t viewed as disloyal, but fairly pragmatically. It was understood that top creatives feared they would lose their jobs if their side lost.”

A pivotal event in Rivals is the public meeting when both sides present their plans. Declan O’ Hara (Aidan Turner) sways the viewers and the IBA Chair, Lady Gosling (Maggie Steed) – a formidable Lady Plowden figure, a force to be reckoned with at the real IBA – with an emotional speech, declaring: “Television has the power to bring us together. It is, I believe, the greatest art form mankind has created.”

Steve Morrison, then Director of Programmes at Granada, remembers a similarly powerful moment at a public meeting when the rival bidder, Phil Redmond of Mersey Television, argued for more local daytime programmes.

“A guy at the back put his hand up and said: ‘I like local programmes, but I don’t like only local programmes. Granada makes programmes like Brideshead Revisited and World in Action that can compete with anything around the world. And I want that scale as well as local.’ That was the shrewdest thing said during our run-up.”

Those who worked in 1980s TV agree that Rivals has got the lifestyle details perfectly: the clothes, hair, smoking and drinking, and incessant sex. “It might be exaggerated, but it was like that. It was very sexist, of course,” says Susan Lewis, a novelist who worked as a production assistant at Thames Television (famously outbid by Carlton) before becoming a full-time writer.

“It wasn’t unusual to be grabbed. And people did smoke and drink all the time. On Thames News, wine would be brought up to the news desk at quarter to six, and everybody would be drinking just before going on air.”

“Way too many people in the industry drank too much,” agrees Thane. “I remember when I joined the IBA in the Midlands, going for lunches, and people were consuming half a bottle of spirits and two bottles of wine. And everyone seemed to be having affairs. It was just all over the place.”

Generally, the women in Rivals display libidos at least equal to those of the men. As Treadwell-Collins told The Telegraph, the show has “a female gaze”. However, there is one very dark moment when a vicar who sits on Baddingham’s board rapes a production assistant. In real life, Thane believes that not all the TV affairs were consensual. “I think there was a mixture of people being taken advantage of, and others trying to sleep their way to the top. It was evident everywhere in the industry in the 70s and 80s.”

Lewis remembers making  her first live programme. “I was counting down to air – 5, 4, 3 – and as I got to 2, the director grabbed my hand and put it on his crotch. Everybody thought it was madly hilarious, so I laughed as well. I was too young to object, and I probably played into it a bit – you felt kind of honoured to be chosen as the butt of a practical joke. It wasn’t until I was much older that I looked back and thought it was so not funny.”

The libertine days of television portrayed in Rivals have mostly gone for good, finished off by legislation and modern mores. And restructuring of the industry meant that people no longer had the time, money or energy for all that bonking and boozing.

“It has taken decades, it’s progress, and, in some instances, it’s for the good and we applaud it,” says Lewis.

“But perhaps it’s not as much fun. And I think it’s why a lot of people enjoyed Rivals as a TV series – because it shows a world that just looks like bloody good fun.”

Rivals is streaming on Disney+.