IOf course it starts with fucking. A close-up of a naked male bottom vigorously thrusting himself into a Concorde toilet. Screams of ecstasy float over the soundtrack of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” as the plane reaches supersonic speeds and the flight attendant pops the champagne. It can only be Jilly Cooper and that ass can only be Rupert Campbell-Black – show jumping champion, international heartthrob, Tory sports minister, screaming guy, absolute shit. Lock your TV remote because Rivals – the greatest piece of doorstop fiction of the 1980s, Blighty’s answer to Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities – has landed on our screens.

Full disclosure. I’m a Jilly Cooper superfan. Dame Jilly is my heroine and Rivals would be my Desert Island Discs book of choice. I took my daughter’s name, Pearl, from one of her books. My love for Jilly is so great that I applied to be an extra on this TV adaptation of Rivals. (Unfortunately, it didn’t work out.) In fact, I’ve written about Jilly before. When this article – more of a love letter, to be honest – was published, she sent me a handwritten, two-page thank you letter addressed to “Darling, darling Jess”, which will be kept as a treasure in my scrapbook, along with my wedding photos and my children’s first drawings . I’m not making this up.

Cooper’s novels have bottoms on the cover (Riders, an absolute peach in white breeches) and exclamation points in their titles (Jump!), which is why she is demeaned as a writer. Which is a travesty because her emotional intelligence is unmatched. There is no one better in the worlds that exist within a marriage. Nobody knows the dynamics of a dinner party better. I learned a lot of what I know about life from Jilly. Generous and wise, she wraps morality tales in a buttery dough of sex, puns and parties. And she’s hilarious, the queen of the delicious takedown. No one – perhaps Jane Austen on a good day – better understands the quintessentially English art of being rude to others by making fun of them. By the way, I’m not the only one who thinks all this. In 2017, Cooper was joined by Cambridge academic Dr. Ian Patterson gave a 3,700-word tribute in the London Review of Books, comparing her world-building abilities as a novelist to those of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Zadie Smith.

What everyone knows about Jilly Cooper is the gender. “As he slid into her, she felt all the astonished joy of a canal lock suddenly realizing it could accommodate the QE2.” That’s not a sentence Dickens would have imagined. And now that Rivals is on TV, sex is everywhere: in the office, on pianos, on piles of coats at parties. Cooper loves sex, loves crushes, gossips about sex, and loves when people like you. She reminds me of another blonde heroine of mine, Donatella Versace, with her feminine desire for eroticism with red lipstick. (Cooper was one of the first popular novelists to mention vibrators in passing.) When it was published, Rivals was notorious for how lavish the sex was, but seeing it on screen in 2024 makes you realize how much fun – and even how healthy it is. Everyone just has a good time, lots of orgasms, none of the gagging and hair pulling of aggressive internet pornography. At the start of the first episode, we see Rupert’s butt again as he plays tennis naked, which is more reminiscent of the Famous Five than Fifty Shades of Grey. It was a simpler time when a grooming routine consisted of lying in the sun until you were auburn, “trimming your bush” with nail scissors (a world without Brazilian wax!) and applying the Fracas or Calèche scent, that the lover had brought with her from duty free.

Buck’s Fizz and Shepherd’s Pie. Wham! and Paul Simon. Long, alcoholic lunches and smoking indoors. The trill of a landline, the burble of a Filofax. “Lady in Red” as the big closing song. Rivals is a time capsule that captures this miniseries perfectly. And for all the cash-in on honey-colored Cotswold stone mansions (of which there are plenty, don’t worry), the world of 20th-century wealth is ostentatious and flashy in a way that feels almost quaint in a post-succession era. Before the hyperscaling of the last three decades, the calibration of wealth was on a different scale. In Rivals’ Rutshire, rich men show off their wealth with cigars, not private jets; Expense accounts, not offshore accounts.

There’s no doubt that Rivals is deeply problematic. First of all, it’s generally assumed that domineering, rude men make the hottest men. Cooper didn’t invent this line – hello, Mr. Darcy – but you still wince a little when Campbell-Black, played by Alex Hassell, says to his lover: “Darling, you know that I love you down to the last detail Love, but never tell me what to do.” Sexism is simply accepted as a fact of life. Campbell’s idea of ​​a compliment is to say admiringly, “With the way she looks, I didn’t think a career was so important But – apart from Rupert CB, who gets a free pass because he looks so divine, darling – Cooper is ruthless in his role in skewering the male ego as a wrecking ball, which is just as destructive to domestic life as it is to David in a boardroom Tennant is wonderful to watch as Lord Baddingham, a huge but fragile ego.

And then there is the casual racism that is present in the book and on screen. For the television appearance of “Rivals,” a certain amount of variety was added to the cast, but only slightly, and the blanket whiteness of many scenes is jarring. For the most part, the moral high ground has been lowered an inch or two on the way to the screen – just enough to prevent outrage. The age difference between Taggie (20) and Rupert (almost twice as old) is overcome, helped by Sex Education Taggie’s Bella Maclean playing slightly less wet than in the original.

In the book, political correctness is a punch line. Guardian readers are grumpy oddballs. For a modern television audience, the slider has been moved a notch or two toward progressive. The novel’s central plot revolves around competition between… television franchises, I believe? That’s really not what it was about, and the details escape me. Anyway, the machinations of terrestrial television these days no longer scream of a white-hot center of power, so the 2024 version focuses on the prospect of powerful people being brought down by what they say on television, which is in the Age of Power Prince Andrew has a certain relevance on Newsnight and Joe Biden’s presidential debate.

In another Cooper book, there is a scene in which a woman is described as “so blonde and beautiful, with such wonderful brown breasts after a week in Portugal, that no one objected to her breastfeeding.” Sometimes, as here, the customs of this world seem like pure comedy. I mean, you might as well try to cancel Blackadder. But not everything feels harmless. I wish that when I first read this book as a young girl I had understood that giving their weight in stones and pounds is a strange way to describe women – with seven and a half stone being the ideal. The blatant body shaming is gone for television, but the mood music remains. At a buffet, we get a close-up of what a character puts on their plate, seemingly as an invitation to judge them on it. Only now is this equal opportunity treatment being given to both men and women.

The nuance of Jilly Cooper is that the joke isn’t always on who he appears to be. Take the rampant snobbery. In Rivals, being called Sharon or Trevor is hilarious. Likewise regional accents. And – well, adultery is one thing, but to say lounge instead of living room! Beyond the pale. Oh, and imagine the shame of having a crescent-shaped flower bed with red and yellow flowers in it instead of honeysuckle and roses and a walled garden! Can you even? Cooper knows this world and all its labyrinthine unwritten rules. Dogs, for example, must be black Labradors or scruffy mixed breeds and must under no circumstances be smaller than a Cocker Spaniel. But – no spoilers – snobs end up getting their money’s worth in Jilly’s world.

Is the rivals’ worldview sexist, racist and classist? Yes. Were these good things? No. But was this world Jilly’s fault? No, it was the fault of patriarchy and global systems of inequality. Don’t try to blame it on my Jilly just because I tell it like it is. Is Rivals good television? Look, I’m clearly the wrong person to ask about the whole hero worship thing. I can tell you that the fashion is amazing: especially Cameron Cook, played by Nafessa Williams, who looks like she’s wearing Yves Saint Laurent while everyone else is wearing Dorothy Perkins. And don’t get me started on the great hair. Or the mustaches. Oh, and the party scenes are a delight. I challenge you to watch Patrick’s 21st and not think, “Wow, we don’t have to take our clothes off.” Banger. Man, I wish I could have been an extra in that scene. The heart wants what it wants. Jilly simply loves Rupert Campbell-Black, despite his many faults. And I feel the same way about Jilly.