Having seen a preview of the new TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel Rivalson 18 October on Disney+), all I can tell you is that it came as a huge relief to me. Its producers have not, thank goodness, felt the need to re-educate the lustful denizens of the rural county of Rutshire – not even that entitled cad, Rupert Campbell-Black – and the result is a feast for sore eyes. Across eight extremely buoyant episodes, exuberant bums abound.
I won’t claim that Cooper’s work is art – though there is, of course, an art to it. But I’m deeply attached to her. Her romances about posh girls in Fulham, a place of which I then knew nothing, got me through A-levels, and ever since I’ve thought of her as a kind of guardian angel. In 2006, I interviewed her at home in Gloucestershire four days before I was to be married (reader, I had to file the piece before I went on honeymoon). When I confessed this to dear, kind Jilly, she was horrified. Why, she wanted to know, was I not lying at home with cucumber slices on my eyes?
