'Racy, glamorous, camp - and very silly'

The TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster is full of "terrible people" and "inappropriate jokes" – it's also brilliant fun. If you're not yet familiar with the fictional worlds of British author Dame Jilly Cooper , then the opening sequence of Rivals – the new Disney+/ Hulu adaptation of one of her best-selling "bonkbusters" – gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect. Seconds into the first episode we're confronted with a man's bare buttocks furiously humping away in an airplane toilet, as his partner at the mile-high club grinds her red stilettoed heel into the bathroom wall.

The ecstatic intro is interspersed with shots of popping champagne corks, seafood platters, enormous shoulder pads – and Concorde breaking the sound barrier. It's racy, glamorous, camp – and very silly. Originally published in 1988, Rivals is the second of Cooper's hugely successful Rutshire Chronicles, a series of books that chronicle the lives (mainly, the sex lives) of English upper and upper-middle classes (these distinctions are incredibly important to Cooper's characters) in an appropriately-named fictional area of The Cotswolds .

Generations of young women, particularly in the UK, found escapism – and sometimes, sexual awakening – in Cooper's books, which were passed around schools and sneaked off the shelves of older sisters. It should be noted, though, that Cooper has plenty of male fans too, including former prime minister Rishi Sunak . So there was both excitement a.