David Tennant, Alex Hassell, Aidan Turner, Emily Atack, and Nafessa Williams in Rivals. The TV show brings to live Jilly Cooper's 1988 novel. Photo / Disney
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In this story from November, Claire Moses meets Jilly Cooper. At 87, Cooper has written raunchy novels for decades. Adapting her 1988 book Rivals for the streaming age meant tweaking some details.
Walking into Jilly Cooper’s house in the English countryside is like stepping inside one of her novels.
The living room walls are covered in pictures or bookshelves, and the surfaces by ceramic cats, dogs and horses. Pictures of loved ones (family) and notables (royal family) are scattered throughout the room. The windows look over a landscape of rolling hills.
It was from this 14th-century home, and on a manual typewriter, that Cooper, 87, wrote the Rutshire Chronicles, an 11-book series of romance novels featuring the handsome and troubled horse-riding hero Rupert Campbell-Black. The novels sold 12 million copies in Britain, where they shaped a generation of readers’ ideas about romance, sex and the upper classes in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Known as “the queen of the bonkbuster” – an amalgam of “blockbuster” and “bonking,” a very English way of referring to you-know-what – Cooper’s name is synonymous in Britain with juicy romance and well-heeled naughtiness. In the United States, it has less resonance.
Disney+ and Hulu are hoping to change that with Rivals, an eight-part series based on Cooper’s 1988 novel of the same title from the Rutshire Chronicles.
“I’m knocked out, because I love this book so much,” Cooper said in a recent interview. “I think it’s my favourite one.” Seeing it turned into a series, she said, was a “great treat,” especially at her age. “Eighty-seven is so old,” she said. “What’s 87 in dog years?”
Onscreen, the suits have shoulder pads, the booze flows freely, and the rivalries are both romantic and professional. On the business side, Rupert (Alex Hassell), the embodiment of privilege and a Minister for Sport in Margaret Thatcher’s Government, enjoys needling the cigar-smoking, power-hungry television executive Tony Baddingham (David Tennant).
The central love story is the developing relationship between the divorced womaniser Rupert and the young, bright-eyed Taggie O’Hara (Bella Maclean), whose married mother also has her eye on Rupert.
“Rivals is absolutely full of about four or five different couples falling madly, madly in love,” Cooper said.
But there is more to the series than romance, said Dominic Treadwell-Collins, the Rivals showrunner, who said he had wanted to bring out the social commentary in Cooper’s books.
“Underneath the fun and the froth and the silliness, there’s a very sharp social satire on British class,” Treadwell-Collins said.
In one scene in episode 2, the television executive Tony puts it bluntly: “Campbell-Black is an arrogant brat, everything people hate about the upper classes,” he says. “The guy always gets anything he wants.”
That power imbalance still resonates, Treadwell-Collins said. “Everyone in Britain is still obsessed with class,” he said. “And the Americans are obsessed with our obsession with class.”
Victoria Smurfit, who is Irish and plays Taggie’s mother, said that Cooper’s books had been educational for her when she moved to England as a teenager. “It was my first understanding of British hierarchy,” Smurfit said. “My book was like my Bible as to how to survive Britain.”
Yet if Cooper’s depiction of class still rings true, her ideas about sex and consent can seem dated. So the producers made some tweaks to suit contemporary expectations.
The Rivals writers’ room was mostly made up of women, from a variety of backgrounds and ages. The group dissected every scene in the book, including one in which Rupert gropes Taggie at a dinner party.
Treadwell-Collins said he was determined to include the moment, which was pivotal to the story. By showing it, he said, he hoped to examine how attitudes had changed. (Unlike in the book, Rupert’s behaviour is criticised by a female character.)
The show’s executives also made changes to Taggie’s character, making her older and a little more assertive. In the book, Taggie is 18 when she meets Rupert, who is in his late 30s; onscreen, she is 20.
“An age gap relationship is completely fine,” Treadwell-Collins said, but a teenager dating a man of that age “was wrong and icky”.
Another change from the book is that Cameron Cook – the American producer at Tony’s male-dominated television network – is now a Black woman.
“I thought it was an interesting twist,” said Nafessa Williams, who plays Cameron. Changing Cameron’s race, Williams added, encouraged people to “confront those prejudiced environments and the assumptions that were made not just about Black women, but about women, in the ‘80s”.
Cooper said her goal when writing the books had been simpler: to cheer people up.
That has been her aim since 1969, when she started writing a funny weekly column in The Sunday Times of London newspaper about being a wife, the stresses of running a household and more. Besides the Rutshire Chronicles, she has written a slew of other novels, as well as nonfiction books on topics including class, dogs, work, marriage and the role of animals in war.
She continues to write, on a typewriter she calls “Erika,” without using the internet.
While Rivals is not the first of Cooper’s novels to reach the small screen – a TV movie version of her 1985 book Riders aired in Britain in 1993 – it is the most ambitious dramatisation, and the first one Cooper is happy with. These onscreen characters, she said, feel like the ones she created.
But away from the show, Cooper is concerned by the state of romance in the 21st century. When people get married these days, she said, “they don’t think it’s going to be forever at all”. (Cooper’s husband of more than 50 years, Leo Cooper, died in 2013.)
Don’t get her started on online dating – which she said sounded like “a nightmare” – or the idea of people meeting at running clubs.
“Nobody will have sex now, because they all run,” she said. “They exhaust themselves, running and running and running.”
The 21st-century preoccupation with fitness does not plague Cooper’s central characters: the only exercise in Rivals – besides horse riding – is a game of naked tennis.
Rivals is available to stream on Disney+
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Claire Moses
Photographs by: Francesca Jones
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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