Shoulder pads at the ready. Rivals, Dame 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 80s 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 Dame Jilly 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”.
“It’s all horses and dogs and houses and cars and wives!” screams Maud O’Hara (played by Victoria Smurfit) of the Cotswolds in the show. So where are all the heartthrob playboys, TV moguls, moneyed blondes and waggy labradors hanging out in England’s super-glam ‘golden triangle’? And how can you experience the Rivals lifestyle yourself?
Where to play
Little over an hour’s road-trip from top to toe (hire a vintage sports car for max Rivals cred), the Cotswolds may be England’s largest Area of Natural Beauty but it’s pocket-sized enough to explore over a long weekend. For classic Cotswolds backdrops, wander in Bisley, Dame Jilly’s home village, which William Morris called ‘the most beautiful village in England’, go shopping in Cotchester – sorry, Tetbury – which has 30 antique shops and counting, or tour Chavenage House, the 400-year-old manor that stars as the O’Hara family home on the show.
Pull! Tony Baddingham may not get his man in Rivals but he always gets his pheasant – try the less bloody version with a spot of clay pigeon shooting on the Farncombe Estate’s 500 acres. Dame Jilly is a lifelong lover of horses, with equestrian high jinks running through her books – to follow in Rupert Campbell-Black’s hoof prints, take a canter at The best spa hotels in the Cotswolds
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