Get the latest gossip
Rivals REVIEW: Jilly Cooper's Rutshire is all so vivid you can almost smell the fag smoke and hairspray, wet dogs - and sex! JANE FRYER
The long, long-awaited TV adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper's best-selling book Rivals was always going to start with a bang.
Not forgetting, of course, the central romance between super-stud Rupert, a former Olympic show jumper and Tory MP, and sweet Taggie O’Hara, who is kind, virginal, dyslexic and just 18 years old. Which, presumably, is why – other than a 1993 film of Riders (the first book in the series) which was so awful and anodyne that most people pretend it doesn’t exist – no one in TV has dared tackle vintage Jilly. How they’ll cope with the sexism, the smoking, the relentless drinking and the suddenly very shocking moment when Rupert gropes poor Taggie as she tries to serve him a portion of her pavlova.
Or read this on Daily Mail