It begins, of course, with bonking. A closeup on a bare male bottom, thrusting energetically in a Concorde loo. Cries of ecstasy float over a soundtrack of Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love as the plane hits supersonic and the flight attendant pops the champagne. It can only be Jilly Cooper, and that bottom can only be Rupert Campbell-Black – champion show jumper, international heart-throb, Tory sports minister, braying toff, absolute shit. Lock up your telly remote, because Rivals – that most gloriously 1980s piece of doorstopper fiction, Blighty’s answer to Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities – has landed on our screens.
Full disclosure. I am a Jilly Cooper super fan. Dame Jilly is my heroine, and Rivals would be my Desert Island Discs book of choice. I took my daughter’s name, Pearl, from one of her books. So ardent is my love for Jilly that I applied to be an extra on this TV adaptation of Rivals. (Sadly it didn’t work out.) In fact, I have written about Jilly before. When that article – more of a love letter, if I’m honest – was published, she sent me a handwritten, two-page thank-you note, addressed to “Darling, darling Jess” which is preserved as a treasure in my scrapbook, along with my wedding photos and my children’s first drawings. I am not making this up.
Cooper’s novels have bottoms on the covers (Riders, an absolute peach in white jodhpurs) and exclamation marks in their titles (Jump!) and she is therefore belittled as a writer. Which is a travesty, because her emotional intelligence is second to none. There is no one better on the worlds that exist within a marriage. No one sharper on the dynamics of a dinner party. Much of what I know about life, I learned from Jilly. She is generous and wise, wrapping morality tales in a buttery pastry of sex and puns and parties. And she is hilarious, the queen of the delicious takedown. No one – perhaps Jane Austen, on a good day – understands better the very English art of getting away with being rude about people by being funny about it. I am not, by the way, the only person who thinks all this. In 2017 Cooper was the subject of a 3,700-word appreciation in the London Review of Books by Cambridge academic Dr Ian Patterson, in which he compared her world-building skills as a novelist to Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Zadie Smith.
What everyone does know about Jilly Cooper is the sex. “As he slid inside her, she felt all the amazed joy of a canal lock suddenly finding it can accommodate the QE2” is not a line Dickens would have come up with. And now that Rivals is on TV, there is sex everywhere: at the office, on top of pianos, on piles of coats at parties. Cooper adores sex, and having crushes, and gossiping about sex, and having people fancy you. She reminds me of another blond heroine of mine, Donatella Versace, in her red-lipsticked feminine lust for the erotic. (Cooper was one of the first popular novelists to make casual mention of vibrators.) When it was published, Rivals was infamous for how bountiful the sex was, but watching it on screen in 2024 you notice how fun – how wholesome, even – it is. Everyone is just having a lovely time, lots of orgasms, none of the choking and hair-pulling of aggressive internet pornography. Early in the first episode, we see Rupert’s bottom, again, because he is playing tennis naked, which feels more Famous Five than Fifty Shades of Grey. It was a simpler time, when a grooming routine meant lying in the sun until you were conker brown, “trimming your bush” with nail scissors (a world innocent of the Brazilian wax!) and splashing on the Fracas or Calèche fragrance your lover brought you from duty free.
Buck’s fizz and shepherd’s pie. Wham! and Paul Simon. Long boozy lunches and smoking indoors. The trill of a landline, the thwack of a Filofax. Lady in Red as the big end-of-night tune. Rivals is a time capsule which this mini-series captures to perfection. And for all the money-shots of honey-coloured Cotswold stone mansions (plenty of those, don’t worry) its world of 20th-century wealth is brash and flash in a way which, in a post-Succession age, feels almost quaint. The calibration of wealth was of a different order before the hyperscaling of the last three decades. In Rivals’ Rutshire, rich men show off their wealth with cigars, not private jets; expense accounts, not offshore ones.
There is no question that Rivals is deeply problematic. For a start, there is a general assumption that domineering, rude men are the hottest kind of men. Cooper did not invent this trope – hello, Mr Darcy – but still, one does flinch a little when Campbell-Black, played by Alex Hassell, says to his beloved, “Darling, you know I love you to bits, but never tell me what to do.” Sexism is simply accepted as a fact of life. Campbell’s idea of a compliment is to say admiringly, “With looks like hers, I wouldn’t have thought a career was that important.” But – aside from Rupert C-B, who gets a free pass because he is just so divine looking, darling – Cooper is ruthless in her skewering of the male ego as a wrecking ball, as destructive to home life as it is in a boardroom. David Tennant is deliciously watchable as Lord Baddingham, all huge but fragile ego.
And then there is the casual racism, present in the book and on screen. A modicum of diversity has been added to the cast for Rivals’ television outing, but only barely, and the wall-to-wall whiteness of many scenes feels jarring. For the most part, the moral hemline has been let down by an inch or two in the journey to screen – just enough to head off outrage. The age differential between Taggie (20) and Rupert (nearly twice that) is skated over, helped by Sex Education’s Bella Maclean playing Taggie as a little less wet than she is in the original.
In the book, political correctness is a punchline. Guardian readers are grumpy oddballs. For a modern television audience, the dial has been nudged a notch or two in the progressive direction. The central storyline in the novel is about competition between … television franchises, I think? It really wasn’t the point, and the details escape me. Anyway, the machinations of terrestrial television don’t scream white-hot centre of power these days, so the 2024 version focuses on the prospect of powerful people being brought down by what they say on television, which has a certain relevance in the age of Prince Andrew on Newsnight and Joe Biden’s presidential debate.
There is a scene in another Cooper book when a woman is described as being “so blonde and beautiful, with such wonderful brown breasts after a week in Portugal, that no one minded her breastfeeding at all”. At times, like here, the mores of this world seem pure comedy. I mean, you might as well try to cancel Blackadder. But not all of it feels harmless. I wish that when I had first read this book as a teenage girl, I had understood that giving their weight in stone and pounds – with seven and a half stone being the ideal – was a weird way to describe women. The stark body shaming has gone, for television, but the mood music remains. At a buffet, we will be given a closeup of what a character puts on their plate, seemingly in an invitation to judge them on it. Only now this treatment is meted out, equal opportunities style, to men as well as women.
The nuance of Jilly Cooper is that the joke is not always on who it appears to be. Take the rampant snobbery. Being called Sharon or Trevor is hilarious in Rivals. So are regional accents. And – well, adultery is one thing, but saying lounge instead of sitting room! Beyond the pale. Oh, and imagine the shame of having a crescent-shaped flower bed with red and yellow flowers in it, instead of honeysuckle and roses and a walled garden! Can you even? Cooper knows this world and all its labyrinthine unwritten rules. Dogs, for instance, must be black labradors or scruffy mongrels, and never, under any circumstances, anything smaller than a cocker spaniel. Yet – no spoilers – snobs get their comeuppance in the end, in Jilly’s world.
Is the Rivals worldview sexist and racist and classist? Yes. Were those good things? No. But was that world Jilly’s fault? No, it was the fault of patriarchy and global systems of inequality. Don’t try to lay it on my Jilly, just for telling it like it is. Is Rivals good TV? Listen, I’m clearly the wrong person to ask, what with the whole hero-worship thing. I can tell you that the fashion is a riot: especially Cameron Cook, played by Nafessa Williams, who looks as if she’s wearing Yves Saint Laurent when everyone else is in Dorothy Perkins. And don’t get me started on the amazing hair. Or the moustaches. Oh, and the party scenes are a joy. I defy you to watch Patrick’s 21st and not think, wow, We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off is a banger. Man, I wish I could have been an extra in that scene. The heart wants what it wants. Jilly simply adores Rupert Campbell-Black, despite his many faults. And I feel the same way about Jilly.
Rivals is on Disney+ from 18 October
