**Raunchy Rivals: Exploring Jilly Cooper’s Provocative Characters and Themes**
Guess where I am. Oh my gosh — I am in RUTSHIRE. If you own one of the multimillion copies sold of Jilly Cooper’s infamous Rutshire Chronicles books, you will a) be as excited as me, and b) know exactly where I am.
Yes, I am standing in front of a beautiful, honey-colored mansion. Yes, it is a beautiful summer’s day. Yes, the herbaceous borders are magnificent. Yes, there are adorable dogs milling around. Yes, there are champagne bottles strewn hither and yon. And yes, everyone is dressed in alternately fabulous, or ridiculous, Eighties outfits, with gigantic hair. The ladies have electric-blue eyeshadow and golden, heaving bosoms. The men, meanwhile, have tanned legs, huge Rolexes — and, in many instances, their gigantic hair manifests lower down: in mustaches like that of Tom Selleck.
And yes, of course, there is drama. David Tennant — wearing a lavish, gold, silken man-blouse and sucking on a cigar — is furious. He is savaging a roomful of party people, all looking stricken — and all, incongruously, wearing swimwear. “How the f*** has this happened?” Tennant screams, as all the tits and legs fidget, gaudy piña coladas abandoned. “Get the f*** out there and sort this out! And why are you all wearing bikinis?”
Today, David Tennant isn’t, of course, David Tennant. He’s Tony Baddingham, the infamous, nominative-determinist baddie of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals. “So, is this fun?” I ask him.
“Oh yes,” Tennant says. “I mean, look at my blouse. It’s like my aunt’s! Actually, I think it might be hers — it closes right to left. Don’t men’s buttons close left to right? Am I wearing,” he asks the room at large, “a woman’s blouse?”
“We need to go again, David,” the director says. “Back in a tick,” Tennant says, running back on set, sucking on his cigar. Getting ready to be really evil, and Eighties, again. Going back — to Rutshire.
Since Riders, the first volume of the Rutshire Chronicles, was published in 1985 — soaring straight to the top of the charts and eventually selling more than one million copies — Jilly Cooper has been the unassailable queen of the English bonkbuster. While Shirley Conran’s Lace and Jackie Collins’ Hollywood Wives might have rivaled Cooper for sales, Cooper’s books are particularly well-thumbed and beloved by their devotees because, underneath all the shagging and scandal, there’s something incredibly English and wholesome about them. Yes, there are villains, and orgies, and boardroom shenanigans — but just as much space is taken up by descriptions of scrumptious shepherd’s pies, heavenly rose gardens, darling horses, and adorable dogs. And yes, the words used are “scrumptious”, “heavenly”, “darling”, and “adorable” — the Cooper lexicon is heavy on delighted adjectives.
## The Journey to TV
There are now at least two generations of women who, technically, emotionally, grew up not in Wolverhampton or Glasgow — but Rutshire. This is why, in many ways, it seems strange it’s taken so long for the Rutshire Chronicles to make it to TV. Yes, there was a made-for-TV movie adaptation of Riders, back in 1993 — but Cooper fans don’t talk about that. At the time, “The acting appears to be from a Gold Blend advert,” was the kindest review.
No, it has taken until 2024 for someone to take on the task, drum up an incredible cast — David Tennant, Alex Hassell, Aidan Turner, Danny Dyer, Katherine Parkinson, Emily Atack — and persuade Disney, of all people, to cough up for all the mansions, helicopters, dogs, champagne, and shoulder pads necessary to bring Dame Jilly Cooper’s beloved, fun, shagging Rutshire to life. A place as mythic to the British imagination as Narnia, the Hundred Acre Wood, or the Brontës’ moors — but with, obviously, a lot more banging.
## The Making of Rivals
“Honestly, people thought I was mad,” says Dominic Treadwell-Collins, executive producer of the show. “I’ve been working on this for ten years. No, more — since the year 2000. I’d been a fan of Jilly since I was 20 — and when I got into TV, whenever I was in a meeting I’d say, ‘I want to do Jilly Cooper. I have to get these books on TV.’ And people would just slap their thighs and laugh.”
Treadwell-Collins’ previous projects include a five-year stint on EastEnders — “When we were getting 20 million viewers for the live shows” — and the multi-Bafta-winning A Very English Scandal, directed by Stephen Frears and starring Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw.
“But now, he still looks puzzled at the mocking reaction Jilly Cooper caused. “I could never understand it. I genuinely think Jilly Cooper is the Jane Austen of our times. These are the books people will study, in the future, when they want to understand what the Eighties were like. Jilly comes across as fluffy and lovely — but she’s got a steely eye when it comes to the sexism, the homophobia, the racism, class. You think it’s all lavish and flirty — and it is — but then, on every third page, she’ll come and kick you in the shins. But every time I pitched it, people would be like, ‘Jilly Cooper? She’s just … a bit naff?’ And it was always men who said it. But I bet if they’d asked their wives, they would say, ‘I LOVE HER! MAKE IT NOW!’ ”
“It’s good to poke fun at these things,” Aidan Turner says of the show’s digs at Eighties TV culture.
It does seem there is a continual, notable blindness to female audiences. It reminds me of all the fuss around Bridgerton when it first aired. Light romantic fiction — your Mills & Boon, your original Bridgerton books — sells more than any other genre. It sells in tens of millions. But because women buy those books, it’s … ignored. Until, that is, US TV behemoth Shonda Rhimes unexpectedly adapted Bridgerton — and it instantly became Netflix’s biggest hit to that point. Suddenly, “books read by women” were revealed to be potential TV goldmines.
“Yes,” Treadwell-Collins says. “We are unashamed in wanting to make female viewers happy with this. We want this to become everyone’s favorite show. For it not to be a dirty secret any more that you love Jilly Cooper. We want people running down the street wearing ‘I LOVE JILLY COOPER’ T-shirts. It’s … a rich treat.”
It certainly is a rich treat. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a set where it’s so obvious that the budget is huge. “We were the last show commissioned in the streaming gold rush,” Treadwell-Collins had said, earlier. “Budgets are very different now.”
There is an emotional support dog on set — of course there is. An ice-cream van turns up at 2pm — burly crew members walk around the grounds eating tiny pink strawberry cones, looking delighted. And, for reasons I never fully discover, someone has a ferret on a lead.
As I wander around the gigantic mansion, I bump into various cast members, who all seem overjoyed to be there.
Claire Rushbrook, who plays Monica Baddingham — Tony Baddingham’s posh, tolerant wife — is in the orangery, having her make-up done, while eating a scone. “I mean, we are doing acting,” she says. “I want to make that clear. But … it is also enormous fun.”
The comedian and actress Emily Atack — playing the irrepressibly titty Sarah Stratton — is lounging on a love seat, in an orange kimono, stroking the emotional support dog. She has spent most of this day wearing nothing but a bikini.
“Oliver Chris and Emily Atack in Rivals”
“I keep chatting to people, like, ‘Hey, Dan, how’s the kids?’ — and then realizing my tits are out,” she says. Nafessa Williams, who plays Cameron Cook, and is, as she says, “the only American on set”, describes everyone as “so welcoming” — but has struggled with small cultural differences.
“My castmates would say, ‘I’m going to the loo,’ and I was like, “What does that even mean?’ I had to be told the loo is the restroom — so it was a whole new world for me.”
When it comes to the atmosphere on set, I later talk to David Tennant about this subject.
“Yes — there was a lot of due diligence about only having … joyful people on set. Crew and cast,” Tennant says, carefully. Treadwell-Collins is more forthright.
“We had a very strict ‘no arseholes’ policy,” he says. “We did a lot of research. On EastEnders, some of [the cast] were really unpleasant; rotten apples who ruined it. For Rivals, we talked to producers and agents off the record, and if they said, ‘He’s a marvellous actor — but also a wanker,’ or, ‘He’ll be amazing, but he did beat up a girlfriend ten years ago,’ we just didn’t cast them. Lots of people [in television] will put up with it. We were like, ‘Life’s too short.’ Also, if you’ve got David Tennant on the call sheet, he’s such a genuinely lovely, kind, decent man — and that flows down through everyone else.
## The Ultimate Pivot: Rupert Campbell-Black
However, while Tennant might be No 1 on the call sheet, Rivals is not his show. For there is one character who is the ultimate pivot of the Rutshire Chronicles: Rupert Campbell-Black. Rupert Campbell-Black is a hot, posh bastard who, due to a three-book-long redemptive arc, is also one of womankind’s most fancied fictional creations. Infamously, he was “inspired” by Queen Camilla’s ex-husband, Andrew Parker-Bowles.
Unlike Andrew, however, there are whole pages on Mumsnet dedicated to middle-aged women describing their hottest Rupert Campbell-Black sexual fantasies. I cannot overstate what a sex god he is held to be by Jilly Cooper fans. “RCB”, as he’s referred to, is … vaginally totemic to millions of women.
After a global search — auditions were held from America to Australia — Alex Hassell, previously seen as Metatron in His Dark Materials, was finally cast in this iconic role. When I talk to him, the main thing I want to discuss with him is how … feverishly his turn will be received.
Are you aware of Rupert’s … lubricious gravity within the Cooper fandom?
“I didn’t read the books as a teenager,” Hassell says, cheerfully. “They were on the top shelf in my mum and dad’s study, and I always wondered what they were.”
Your mother was a Jilly Cooper fan? And, therefore, presumably … a Rupert Campbell-Black fan?
“My mum, you know … blushed when I told her [I’d got the role],” Hassell admits. “A lot of women blushed when I told them.”
## The Emotional Centerpiece
The main plot of Rivals revolves around the, well, rivalry between Tony Baddingham and Rupert Campbell-Black. When young, Baddingham was bullied by Campbell-Black at boarding school. Now a powerful TV CEO — running the Rutshire local TV franchise — Baddingham still loathes Campbell-Black. Why? All the cast have been to a “Jilly Party”, at her home.
“You just leave absolutely pissed,” says one. “They have to ladle you into a taxi.”
“Oh, the last one was just a little party,” Cooper says. What’s a little party? “Seventy, seventy-five people?” Cooper says. “And then friends from the village, obviously. Andrew Parker-Bowles. Richard Madeley and his wife. Nicky Haslam. Lisa Maxwell. Stanley Tucci — who was heavenly.”
Please tell me the party was exactly like the ones in the books.
“Well, yes. We had kir royale, Pimm’s, wines. Gins.” Note: gins multiple. “Vol-au-vents, melon and Parma ham, smoked salmon on blinis. Brandy snaps with Chantilly cream. Everyone got awfully tight. I led them around the infamous tennis court.”
The tennis court at Cooper’s house is the setting for one of her most iconic scenes — where Campbell-Black first meets his love interest, Taggie, while he’s playing naked tennis. He is adjudged to have lost a match point because something is over the line. Oh, why am I being so coy? This is Jilly Cooper. It’s his penis. His massive penis is judged to be over the line. A note to diehard fans: this scene is shot exactly as written. You will see a lot of willies.
“We’ve been equal opportunities in our nudity,” Treadwell-Collins says. “There’s a willy for every pair of tits.”
“That was my great disappointment over the TV show,” Cooper sighs. “The tennis court is a terrible mess — no one’s played on it for 20 years — and I thought [Disney] might be darlings and build me a new one.” She looks around, hopefully. “Do you think anyone here has some booze?” she asks. “It is the afternoon.”
## The Emotional Support Dog and the Ice-Cream Van
Cooper has been an invaluable muse to everyone on set while filming. In one scene, she handed over an urgent note that read, “Rupert would never say ‘spouse’ — that’s very lower-middle [class]. He would say ‘wife’.” She argued for particularly Cooperesque jokes and puns to stay in, and was firm that the whole “First of May” tradition remain.
“Oh, yes,” she says, looking delighted, and then quotes herself. “ ‘First of May, first of May — outdoor f***ing starts today. But if as usual it do rain, we f*** off indoors again.’ ” This ribald rhyme kicks off a massive shagging montage, involving the entire cast. And all outdoors, of course.
But, as any English person knows, outdoor sex is a perilous sport. Perhaps the emotional centerpiece of Rivals is the agonizingly drawn-out attraction between Freddie (Danny Dyer) and Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson), both married to awful people, but who ache for each other in a way that is guaranteed to bring tears to the viewers’ eyes. A scene where they bunk into the first-class carriage of a train to smoke fags and share fruitcake, while timidly flirting with each other, is the Brief Encounter of our time.
And, without wanting to chuck in too many spoilers, when they finally requite their love for each other, it’s one of the all-time great sex scenes. Danny Dyer, it turns out, is exquisite, adorable leading-man material, while Katherine Parkinson “is the new Olivia Colman”, Treadwell-Collins says, firmly. “She will be garlanded with Baftas and Oscars. Honestly. And she wanted to do the sex scene,” he adds. “She was like, ‘I really want to show my boobs. I’m in my mid-forties and they look good.’ In that scene, you can see she’s crying — really crying, with happiness — and it makes you cry too. She looks like a f***ing queen.”
On set, however, the sex scene was not without its problems. Because it was “outdoor f***ing”, in a flower meadow.
“But it was at the height of tick season,” Treadwell-Collins recalls, with a shudder. “Not safe to be in the grass. We didn’t want to get a tick on Danny Dyer’s willy! In the end, we had to get in a load of moss for them to lie on. It’s the first time, to my knowledge, that safe sex has involved moss.”
## The Making of Rivals
I can’t tell you what fun it is interviewing all the Rivals people. Because of the show, everyone talks about their memories of the Eighties (David Tennant: “No, my Eighties weren’t like a Jilly Cooper book — I was at school in Paisley with my glasses held together with sticky tape, and a very unappealing haircut”), and smoking (Hassell: “Everyone smoked everywhere, didn’t they? Even on planes. They’d draw across that little … health curtain, and everyone smoked behind it”), and how hard it was to leave Cooper’s world when shooting finished (Hassell: “No one was looking at me like I’m the most sexy man on the planet any more. It was tough.”)
My final interview is with Aidan Turner, who is playing Rivals’ chat show host, Declan O’Hara. I mean to cast no aspersions on extremely handsome men who spent a decade being a country’s totemic sex god — as Turner was, during his Poldark years — but sex gods are usually quite emotionally damaged, with a form of what might be termed “PTSD” — Post-Totty Stress Disorder. They often make for effortful company. They want to be taken seriously.
In the event, Turner, 41, is an absolute hoot — particularly on the subject of the massive mustache he sports on the show. It is a magnificent specimen of upper-lip pelt. It looks like a vole fell asleep under his nose.
It looks like the one Ned Flanders has on The Simpsons, I tell him. Turner gives a huge, barking laugh. “Ned Flanders? I mean, I was thinking more … Irish stag? Super-masculine?”
Turner’s relaxed stance towards his sex god-dom comes with an interestingly meta twist. In Rivals, one of Baddingham’s TV shows is called Four Men Went to Mow — where sexy farmers, sexily stripped to the waist, carry out sexy agricultural duties. Turner, of course, infamously stripped to the waist a few times in Poldark, for that scything scene or lying in bed or emerging from the sea. In a pleasingly postmodern moment, one scene sees Turner rail against Four Men Went to Mow — raging, almost camply, “TV can’t just be men taking their tops off!”
“It’s good to poke fun at these things,” Turner says.
As one of the most Eighties stories ever, Rivals takes on some massive subjects: class, Aids, Section 28, sexism, rape, homophobia, Thatcherism, racism. As the Jane Austen of her time, Cooper has a lot of grist