Welcome To The Jillyverse: Inside Disney’s Rivals

By Clare Naylor

1 month ago

It’s poignant, riotous, funny, sexy

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To mark Disney+’s new adaptation of Rivals, Clare Naylor – one of the screenwriters – gives us a refresher on all things Jilly Cooper.

Inside Rivals With Screenwriter Clare Naylor

When the new adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s eighties novel Rivals hits TV screens this Friday (18 October), there will no doubt be a collective rush to bookcases across the country in a bid to break out the old paperbacks and revisit the canon – Riders, Polo, Appassionata – as readers reacquaint themselves (and younger viewers take an inaugural leap) with the particular magic that’s made this newly anointed dame one of the nation’s most beloved novelists for almost five decades.

Like most girls of my generation, I was inculcated with the joys of Jilly Cooper through her early shorter novels such as Imogen, Harriet and Octavia, where the young heroines had sex on barge holidays with devilish Welsh lovers and were seduced by men in tennis whites. It was only many decades later, when I was asked to write an episode of Rivals for Disney+ and took a deep dive into all things Jilly, that I encountered Rupert Campbell-Black for the first time. Long after she first dreamed him up, he was still galloping and romping across the pages of her juicier, more adult novels such as Riders and Polo. Only then did I begin to understand what I had missed. Not just Cooper’s heroes, but her very idiosyncratic literary style.

What makes Dame Jilly a true national treasure (aside from the fact she’s sported the same hair-do for longer than the late queen did and still has exquisite legs at the ripe age of 87) – and what sets her apart from the leopard-print legion of bonk-busting novelists of her era – is her humanity and warmth. She sees only the good in everyone, real and fictitious, and her characters are as lovable as old friends, despite their peccadillos and often appallingly bad behaviour. There’s also a light-hearted, very British esprit to her novels that consists of outrageous puns and heady superlatives; earthy sex and unearthly sex; dog hair and body hair (Jilly loves a ‘bush’, and her heroines are often caught spritzing theirs with Anais Anais before a night of passion with somebody else’s husband); the people are unerringly beautiful; and her dulcet depiction of the English countryside is as pretty as any Wordsworth might have conjured.

It’s the spell of joy that Jilly Cooper casts that makes the current TV series such an unapologetic delight in a schedule heaving with true crime and psychopaths. Her novels are the antidote to grim reality. During the writing of the show, Jilly would occasionally appear like a fairy godmother in the writer’s room, sharp as a tack and poised with the perfect anecdote to fill a gap in the plot; or at the office Christmas party, fragrant and giggling, likening champagne to ‘Snow White’s orgasm’ and handing out compliments like delicious canapés. It’s this irrepressible joie de vivre that ensures when her readers put down her books, they’re left basking in an afterglow that usually only comes from, well… let’s not get ahead of ourselves. All that is to come (pun always intended). Before we go too far (which we obviously will), here’s the lowdown on all things Rivals.

Aidan Turner as Declan O’Hara in Rivals. (Courtesy of Robert Viglasky/Disney)

Where Is Rutshire?

Rutshire is basically Gloucestershire with more sex, as the name cheekily suggests. It’s staggeringly picturesque. As arch-villain Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) says to Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner) at one point, ‘What are you doing dodging dogshit in Fulham? Come to Cotchester. Even I have to pinch myself sometimes at how fucking beautiful it is.’

Who Lives There?

More specifically, who doesn’t? Rivals 2024 has a cast for days – apart from Tennant and Turner, there’s Danny Dyer, Victoria Smurfit, Katherine Parkinson, Bella Maclean and Alex Hassell, to name hardly any of them. Everyone behaves in main character style. They drink champagne from floral teacups at breakfast time, indulge in naked tennis with other people’s wives before lunch, share baths with labradors and, in consummate ’80s fashion, dance drunkenly around handbags to the Birdie Song at garden parties. They also, obviously, have a lot of sex.

Property Porn, Much?

Every home in the show is a work of art, some admittedly more eighties Athena print than Constable, but there are Laura Ashley prints, swags and pelmets, glass coffee tables and peach satin sheets galore, as we step back through louvred doors into the decade that taste forgot. From the classical grandeur of Penscombe Court, Rupert Campbell-Black’s family seat, to the cosy, rambling chaos of The Priory, where the O’Hara family live, and Green Lawns, where Freddie and Valerie Jones reside in nouveau riche splendour among shagpile so deep it needs to be raked, not vacuumed, by the trusty daily Mrs Makepiece. It’s the television equivalent of stumbling across the November 1986 issue of World of Interiors by the loo in a country house.

Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black in Rivals.
(Courtesy of Robert Viglasky/Disney)

Rupert Campbell-Black…

Clearly this was going to come up. Jilly’s love of superlatives is not wasted here. ‘The most handsome man in England’ is played to wicked perfection by RSC alumnus Alex Hassell, and there will inevitably be an initial, Daily Mail-style, national outpouring of fury that he isn’t blond, as Dame Jilly intended him. But hold your horses (yes, literally), because I promise you that three-and-a-half minutes (a bit quick, I know, but as it takes place in the loo on Concorde, the brevity is forgivable) into the first episode you’ll have entirely forgiven and forgotten the travesty of converting one of literature’s hottest blonds into a brunet. Viewers, it works!

Has Rivals Really Gone Woke?

This adaptation is as riotous as Dame Jilly intended and not for the delicately disposed. No attempt is made to avoid the thornier issues of the era – homophobia, Thatcher, AIDS, domestic and sexual violence – which are all dealt with head-on and with veracity. Much like in the current climate, the men are unconstructed bounders who mostly get away with their terrible behaviour; it’s 1986 and nobody had heard of the patriarchy. The women have their own response to despicable cads and aren’t averse to delivering deft slaps to the cheek or withering put-downs when the occasion demands.

David Tennant as Lord Tony Baddingham in Rivals. (Courtesy of Robert Viglasky/Disney)

Apart From The Obvious, What’s It About?

Rivals is set in the world of Corinium Television, which is turned upside down when megastar broadcaster Declan O’Hara (Turner) and his restless, feckless, red-headed wife Maud (Smurfit) arrive in Cotchester with their three children, Taggie, Patrick and Caitlin, trailing clouds of glamour and wreaking romantic mayhem. The O’Haras throw parties, put dastardly Tony Baddingham in a very bad mood and reignite the creative spark in erstwhile novelist Lizzie Vereker (Parkinson), the neglected wife of cheesy TV host, James (Oliver Chris). There are affairs and alliances, passes are made and electronics millionaire (no vulgar billionaires back then, such a relief) Freddie Jones (Dyer) assumes the role of heartthrob by stealth.

With the novel coming in at 716 pages, this is obviously not everything. Most crucially, the adaptation of Rivals can’t be pinned down to a single note – it’s poignant, riotous, funny, sexy, sad and sometimes even dark. It’s also a respite from modern life, which can sometimes seem such very hard work. Welcome to the Jillyverse.