'Rivals', an eight-part series based on Jilly Cooper's 1986 novel, is an entertaining, upper-class shagfest. There's even a spot of naked tennis. Video / Disney+
THREE KEY FACTS
Rivals, an eight-part TV series based on Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel about the horsey British upper class, has been described as “the silliest, sexiest show of the year”.
The character of handsome, womanising aristocrat Rupert Campbell-Black was partly inspired by Queen Camilla’s first husband, Andrew Parker Bowles.
Cooper, now 87, still lives in the 14th-century Cotswolds manor, The Chantry, that was the model for Campbell-Black’s house.
OPINION
Her number was right there in the phone book: L & J Cooper, Bisley, Gloucestershire. So I gave the queen of bonkbusters a call.
It was 1996 and Jilly Cooper’s latest book in the Rutshire Chronicles – the notorious upper-class shagfest that inspired Rivals, one ofthis year’s most talked-about TV shows – had shot to the top of the bestseller list in Britain.
I was a freelance journalist spending a few months in Oxford and thought she’d be fun to talk to. How delightful, she said. Would I care to come for afternoon tea?
Then all hell broke loose.
First, her publisher rang me in a panic. Then her horrified agent. Not only had I committed an egregious breach of protocol by not going through the proper channels, but they seemed to view me as some kind of a threat to national security. Any minute I expected MI5 to come crashing through my door.
After providing proof of my credentials, the interview was finally approved under strict conditions. No questions were to be asked about her connections with the royal family (Camilla Parker Bowles, one of Cooper’s old mates, was apparently an adviser on Riders) or the state of her marriage (husband Leo had been outed in the national press for a long-running affair).
The trouble was, no one seemed to have communicated the rules of engagement to her. “Disarmingly frank and shamelessly indiscreet, Cooper likes to please and is pleased to be liked,” I later wrote.
The royal family were very difficult to marry into, she told me. Major Ronald Ferguson, the father of Prince Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, was another good friend. “Fergie, the poor child, is doing her best.” Diana, Princess of Wales, who would die in a car crash the following year, had made the mistake of marrying a man who did not love her, “so her lover became the public”.
As for her advice to Camilla: “If there was one thing I would say to her gently, it’s that if you want to endear yourself to the British public, give up hunting.”
Jilly Cooper signs copies of her anthology "The British in Love" at a department store in London in 1980 – a few years before I came knocking at her door. Photo / Getty Images
I’d arrived half an hour late at The Chantry, her 14th-century manor in the Cotswolds, after getting hopelessly lost in the tangle of quaint villages and finally waving down a local for directions.
“You poor darling. How awful!” she said, pressing my face to her cheek as if I’d survived some ravishingly perilous adventure. “Come and have something to drink.”
Then aged 59, Cooper was charming and funny as we talked over a salmon lunch and glasses of chilled white wine. But she also seemed lonely and vulnerable on her rambling country estate with Leo, a publisher of military books, spending much of his time in London and only her dogs (and her assistant, Pippa) for company.
I don’t remember all the details now but some of the things she talked about were so raw and revealing that I felt protective towards her and didn’t include them in my story.
“A Gloucestershire woman of 60 does sound terribly old,” she’d said. “If a man is famous, people want to go to bed with him. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work the same way with women.”
Now 87, Cooper is much frailer in the video clips I’ve seen of her lately but still sparkling with character and a lively sense of fun. Her marriage to Leo survived, but he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and died in 2013.
Now 87, Jilly Cooper published her latest book in the Rutshire Chronicles, "Tackle!", last year. Photo / New York Times
Last month, she told Good Housekeeping magazine she was “absolutely knocked out – ecstatic” about the screen adaptation of Rivals, which she said was her favourite novel because she loves the characters so much. “Even the most ruthless display moments of tenderness and vulnerability, and the shyest and gentlest show courage and integrity as true love blossoms.”
The eight-part series, streaming here on Disney+, is set in the “power-grabbing social elite of 1980s England”.
A star-studded cast includes David Tennant as the detestable Lord Tony Baddingham, Alex Hassell as the rakish Rupert and relative newcomer Bella Maclean (who appeared in the fourth series of Sex Education) as his young “will they, won’t they” love interest, Taggie O’Hara. There’s a lot of bonking involved and a spot of nude tennis. The Guardian gave it five out of five stars.
Cooper’s saucy sagas owe something to the Mills & Boon novelettes of her angsty teens: “Four a day to alleviate heartache.” In the 70s, she wrote a long-running newspaper column on marriage, sex and housework before the publication of Riders in 1985, the first book in her Rutshire Chronicles, followed by Rivals and then Polo. The 11th volume in the series, Tackle!, was published in 2023.
Today, she still lives at The Chantry, which she used as the model for Rupert Campbell-Black’s house. The upper class, she told me back in 1996, floated on the top of society like water lilies, with people bobbing about trying to be friends with them.
Where did she, a brigadier’s daughter from Yorkshire, fit into the social scale? “I’m the court jester,” she said. “They quite like me because I make them laugh.”
This year, she was made a Dame in the New Year Honours for services to literature and charity.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
