Shoulder pads at the ready. Rivals, Jilly Cooper’s brilliant bonkbuster of a book, has exploded onto our TV screens, with David Tennant as Lord Tony Baddingham going head to head against Alex Hassell’s dastardly delicious playboy Rupert Campbell-Black. Raucous dinner parties, shady business deals and games of naked tennis ensue, all set to a banging Eighties soundtrack. And while sex and scandal are front and centre, there’s another glamorous star to admire on both page and screen – the beautiful backdrop of the Cotswolds, where the book is set and where much of the show was filmed.
The fictional county of Rutshire, where Rivals unfolds, is based on Gloucestershire, where Cooper has lived since 1982, and her cast of characters carouse in honey-stoned manor houses in and around the town of Cotchester, brought to life in Tetbury in the new Disney+ adaptation. In Rivals, Cooper’s characters gallop across lush rolling hills, party in crumbling yet charming manor houses, and shop for their power suits in country boutiques. Cooper herself, “queen of the bonkbuster” and executive producer of the series, lives in the postcard-worthy village of Bisley and calls her home stomping ground “heartbreakingly beautiful”.
