The bestselling British author Jilly Cooper has died at the age of 88. Ahead of the release of a TV adaptation of her smash hit bonkbuster Rivals last year, Cooper reflected on what we have learned and lost in the years since she first committed it to the page.
When I moved from London to the West Country in the ’80s with my late husband, Leo, and my children, Felix and Emily, I found sex as prolific outside of marriage as in. Everywhere I looked people seemed to be committing both adultery and fornication—even the animals in the fields seemed to be at it, and not just the rabbits.
I was amazed to meet a glamorous peer who, when he got married for a fourth time, asked all of his three ex-wives to sleep with him as a wedding present. I remember a dinner where the hosts, bitterly rowing one moment, had sloped off upstairs for a shag between courses. (Giving a whole new meaning to the term intercourse.) I also remember being very disappointed after an attractive man was showing an interest in me, but when he asked me to a dinner party to meet his wife, she immediately informed me that her husband had received 35 Valentines earlier that year: “Keep off the grass!”
These were the people who became the inspiration for my bestselling 1988 novel, Rivals—a tale of challenging misbehavior to uncover secrets in the world of television—kindly described by the Daily Mail at the time as “a gloriously sexy rampage through the Cotswold countryside backed by the excitement of an exceptionally well researched account of the backstabbing and ruthless machinations behind a television franchise battle.”
In the story, Lord Baddingham is the controller of Corinium Television, a ruthless businessman far more interested in making a fortune from advertising and terrorising his staff than producing good programmes. To help him to win his renewal bid for a franchise, he poaches Irish megastar Declan O’Hara from the BBC, who moves his beautiful but bored wife, Maud, to the Cotswolds, along with his two pretty daughters. What follows is prolific battles in both boardrooms and bedrooms as everyone struggles to stay on top.
Almost 40 years on from when I first sat down to write it, Rivals has been adapted for TV by Disney+. The brilliant David Tennant takes on Lord Baddingham and Aidan Turner—he of Poldark and handsome fame—is Declan O’Hara. Unlike previous dramatizations of my work, when my characters and plots have been changed out of all recognition, the spirit of my original novel is alive and well. From cast to script, the world of the late ’80s has been vividly brought back to life.
And what a world it was. Now in my late 80s, I would need my walking stick to fend off any lecherous advances. Rereading Rivals, I was transported back in time and both amazed and shocked by how things have changed in the past nearly four decades. Back then, as I remember it, everyone seemed to be partying, smoking, having long wine-fuelled lunches, and masses and masses of sex. Admittedly, much of the story is set in the Cotswolds, home of the Beaufort Hunt, famed for its high fences and low morals. But today, the boozy lunches have been replaced with actual working lunches and the sex with speed swiping, which has taken a lot of fun and mischief out of the world.
In Rivals, mistress swapping rather than wife swapping seems to be de rigueur. My all-time hero, havoc-maker Rupert Campbell-Black, newly divorced, appears to have two on the go. The first is journalist Beattie Johnson, known as the First Not Quite a Lady of Fleet Street, whom he bonks in the Concorde loo. The second is the ravishing wife of a fellow MP, who, when Rupert is caught playing nude tennis, declares she “does not require fidelity from her husband, but she does from her lover.” The series definitely looks at eroticism from a female point of view.
It’s not surprising to me that Gen Z voted the ’80s as the best time to live through. Today there seems to be far less bonking. Everyone seems to expend their energy in the gym or jogging round and round the country. So many couples meet online now, which is far less spontaneous and exciting than the wild office parties and dances of the old days when everyone was getting off with everyone. Or when on “some enchanted evening you would see a stranger across a crowded room” and you’d end up snogging his face off rather than exchanging numbers to text one another later.
But the ’80s were often a challenging and painful time. For gay people, in particular. In Rivals, Corinium’s head of religious broadcasting is heartbroken when he is ditched by his lover, Gerald, but Gerald, Rupert’s brilliant parliamentary private secretary, feels he must marry a wife to give the front of respectability he needs to further his career. One of the loveliest things today is that same-sex marriages are now widely celebrated with many couples also happily being able to adopt children to add to their families.
Bringing Rivals to life, I have been reminded of how families regularly stayed in together to watch series like Dallas and Dynasty beamed straight into their homes. There were only four television channels back then which meant massive TV ratings. 30 million viewers watched Dirty Den serving divorce papers on Angie Watts in British soap Eastenders and 17 million watched the series’s first gay kiss. But now entertainment exists in the palm of one’s hand rather than on the box in the corner of the room. Oblongitis abounds in families, all looking at their phones around the table in restaurants and in their own homes rather than engaging in real and lively conversations about events of the day. Going to a concert just to watch and listen has been replaced by filming it on phones.
Clothes, if one looks at past copies of Vogue, tended to be more butch in the ’80s with mile-wide padded shoulders, nipped-in waists, short hair hidden by hats, and vast ankle-length coats in real fur much disapproved of (and widely banned) today. Shape has certainly changed too. Back in the ’80s one was still doing endless exercises to reduce one’s bottom, with slender celebs such as British television presenter Anneka Rice winning Rear of The Year awards. But today, big and lifted bums are all the rage with filler-filled lips sticking out further than boobs. Ironically, stiff upper lips seem to have almost vanished as both sexes burst into tears if anything either lovely or lousy happens to them.
Status and class reign supreme in Rivals, in a way that is not the same today. Lord Baddingham, despite being a life peer, is chippy because he went to a grammar school, and bitterly resents that Old Harrovian Rupert has never invited him to join his racy, fun-loving set. Rupert, on the other hand, instantly pals up with Freddie Jones (played brilliantly by Danny Dyer), an adorable electronics multimillionaire with a broad cockney accent who never tries to hide his working-class roots.
Back in the ’80s in Gloucestershire, I remember a rather grand next door neighbor dropping in and me leaping in front of a clump of scarlet poppies which I’d just planted, when I heard her telling my husband that one should never have bright red in a Cotswold garden. Dinner parties were a nightmare too, with people worrying whether they should say “napkin” rather than “serviette” or serve cheese before the pudding, or if the most important guest had been seated on the wrong side of the hostess. Now, it is far more relaxed, with hostesses serving a takeaway and lots of wine with screw caps without fear of sneering from their guests.
But above all, in Rivals, I show true love blossoming. I think at that time many more believed that a long and happy marriage was the best thing life had to offer and that God was in heaven if all was Mr. Right with the world. Sadly, today it’s said that nearly five out of 10 marriages end in divorce. It is easier to legally divorce, which is good if you are miserably unhappy. But it’s tragic that so many parents miss seeing their children, or grandparents their grandchildren, and vice versa. Then you have the endless nightmare problems and rivalries of adjusting to step-parents and stepchildren.
I was incredibly lucky to find such an adorable husband. As I wrote in an earlier book: The secret of a happy marriage is creaking bed springs as much from laughter as from sex. Perhaps we should all try a bit harder. But as LP Hartley wrote in The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”