One of Jilly Cooper’s best-loved novels, Rivals, is set to be adapted for a Disney+ TV series, the streaming service has announced.
The eight-episode series, which will bring a “2020s lens to the 1980s”, according to a Disney+ announcement, is based on Cooper’s 1988 book of the same name. Rivals is the second book in the popular author’s Rutshire Chronicles, which follows the affluent elite in 1980s Britain. The 10 books – the most recent of which is 2016’s Mount! – are linked by a number of recurring characters, including Rupert Campbell-Black, an aristocrat, show jumper, Tory politician and serial heartbreaker.
Focusing on the TV industry, Rivals sees talkshow star Declan O’Hara get recruited to work for a company called Corinium television. Corinium’s managing director Tony Baddingham, O’Hara quickly learns, is a fierce rival of Campbell-Black’s. O’Hara also has to contend with a rivalry of his own – with Cameron Cook, the domineering producer of his programme.
Among the novel’s romantic storylines is a budding relationship between Campbell-Black, who is in his late 30s, and O’Hara’s daughter Taggie, who is 20.
Announcing the show, Disney+ said: “Rivals is a joyously mischievous rollercoaster ride, steamy in its love stories and packed with larger-than-life characters. Yet beneath the spectacle and fun, the series brings a 2020s lens to the 1980s, offering a raw exploration of a complicated moment in British history when class, race, sex, wealth and sexual liberation meant that, for the very privileged few, there were no limits to what they could achieve.”
The series is being written by Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who was an executive producer on A Very English Scandal and EastEnders, and Olivier award winner Laura Wade, and who wrote the screenplay for the film The Riot Club.
Cooper will also be an executive producer. She said she was “so, so excited” about the adaptation and could not wait to see who would step into the shoes of Campbell-Black.
The author has previously revealed that Campbell-Black was a composite of the Duchess of Cornwall’s first husband Andrew Parker Bowles, fashion designer Rupert Lycett Green, and Michael Howard, the 21st Earl of Suffolk.
Treadwell-Collins said Cooper’s “iconic novels’ razor-sharp observations on class, sex, love and what it means to be British resonate even more today than when Jilly wrote them in the 1980s”.
Riders, the first book in the Rutshire Chronicles series, was adapted into a film in 1993 starring Marcus Gilbert as Campbell-Black. In 2016 it was announced that Cooper’s series would be adapted for ITV by UK production company FilmWave, although this never materialised.
Rivals is being produced by Happy Prince, which is part of ITV Studios, and will air globally on Disney+, on Hulu in the US and on Star+ in Latin America.
