Why Disney+’s Rivals series could see Jilly Cooper hailed as Jane Austen of the 1980s

If you’ve ever stayed in self-catering accommodation anywhere in Britain, you will know there are some non-negotiables. The heating must be hopeless, there is never enough toilet roll and any bookshelf must have a dog-eared copy of the Jilly Cooper novel Rivals.

That’s hardly surprising because 11 million have been sold in the UK since publication in 1988 and they all have to end up somewhere. With its casual sexism and copious sex, it’s not the kind of book you want colleagues to see behind you on a Zoom call, so a draughty bungalow near Duns might sound like the perfect repository. However that could be about to change.

The Disney+ adaptation of Rivals is out this weekend and will take the story to a brand new audience who will no doubt see at as Bridgerton but with weirder costumes. They won’t apply the literary snobbery that has dogged Jilly Cooper for years but I doubt she cares having made £10 million from the caper.

Ian Rankin’s guilty pleasure

That success is built on something solid. Peel away the reputation and you have a modern-day morality tale, packed with fabulous characters and coruscating dissections of country life and the pursuit of wealth.

The London Review of Books compared Jilly Cooper to Charles Dickens, although Jane Austen might be a more obvious correlation. Our own Ian Rankin says Rivals is his guilty pleasure, admitting he’s read it at least half a dozen times.

The attraction is the plotting and characterisation but aspects of the story are problematic in these more enlightened times, so why on earth has the biggest entertainment company in the world decided to eschew new writing and bring “a 2020s lens to the 1980s”?

Jilly Cooper was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire at Windsor Castle earlier this year (Picture: Andrew Matthews) | POOL/AFP via Getty Images

The answer is nostalgia. Whenever times are tough a healthy dose of how-things-used-to-be seems to cure all. Disney knows this through regularly revising their back catalogue over the past century and Rivals is just the latest attempt to deploy the reassurance of the past.

Last week the BBC screened the 1984 drama Threads, an absolutely terrifying vision of societal breakdown after a nuclear attack on Britain that proved to be so disturbing it had stayed in the archive ever since. But what it threatened hasn’t happened and that must be a source of encouragement even as the nuclear rhetoric ramps up again.

Leg-warmers, big hair and nuclear Armageddon

If the 1980s were a time when we fixated on nuclear Armageddon, it was also a time when we lived large. When we weren’t worrying about building a home bomb shelter, we were eating Findus Crispy Pancakes, smoking indoors and paying 50p for a pint.

All that was being done in some style with shoulder pads, taffeta, neon colours, leg-warmers and big hair. And that was just the men.

But let’s not get too nostalgic, we also had the miners strike, the Hillsborough disaster, IRA bombings, Aids and Chernobyl. The 80s were vibrant and fun but also somehow grey and depressing.

Onscreen Rivals transports us back to a time when life seemed simpler but actually doing things was much more complicated. Technology has revolutionised life since the book was first published.

It offers pure escapism on our screens but also a reminder that the past wasn’t necessarily better… it was just different and the best time to be alive is simply the time you are alive.