Horses and bonking – The 80s are back!
07/10/24 10:04 Filed in: Fiction
In the world of literary adaptations, none seems to caught the imagination in recent months as much as the upcoming series on Disney+ based on the 1980s classic bonkbuster Rivals, by Dame Jilly Cooper.
The second of the author's Rutshire Chronicles series, it is a steamy romp set in the cutthroat world of independent television, in which a heartthrob TV presenter, Declan O'Hara (played by Aidan Turner of Poldark fame) is roped into working at the failing Corinium television studios by its crooked owner, the aptly named Lord Baddingham, played by David Tennant. The cast also includes Alex Hassell as his rival, the ex-Olympian and Tory MP Rupert Campbell-Black, and Nafessa Williams, who plays the glamorous producer Cameron Cook.
Breathless articles in the mainstream media, but also Good Housekeeping magazine, Tatler and even (or perhaps naturally) Horse and Hound, attest to how much excitement there is in the air about this return to a decade that has been much mythologised in the intervening years.
Fortunately, it seems that the production team, and Disney, have recognised that they should do the book, and the era, justice in this onscreen version.
"Unlike previous dramatisations of my work, when my characters and plots have been changed out of all recognition, the spirit of my original novel is alive and well," Cooper said in Vogue recently. "From cast to script, the world of the late ’80s has been vividly brought back to life."
She continues: "And what a world it was. Now in my late 80s, I would need my walking stick to fend off any lecherous advances. Rereading Rivals, I was transported back in time and both amazed and shocked by how things have changed in the past nearly four decades."
Cooper explains: "Back then, as I remember it, everyone seemed to be partying, smoking, having long wine-fuelled lunches and masses and masses of sex."
She goes on to bemoan the replacement of boozy lunches with "actual working lunches and the sex with speed swiping, which has taken a lot of fun and mischief out of the world."
It is of course hard to look back at the 1980s, or any decade for that matter, and get a true sense of the lives that people actually lived.
In some ways, the 80s are as remote to us now as are the 1940s or the 1880s. Life as it was lived then was fundamentally different, even if most people weren't living life in the fast lane and horsing around (literally and metaphorically) at the weekends.
For me, one of the most important differences between then and now is that people were much less aware of themselves as a construct and how they appeared to others. They simply acted and spoke as they saw fit, and so were much more 'individual' than they are now, even if society itself was in many ways much more conformist and far less tolerant of difference.
And of course there is the internet and mass communication, which is mentioned so often in this context that it has become something of a cliché. Yet it is undeniable that the invasion of media into our pockets and daily lives has changed so much of the way we interact with the world.
In the 80s, not everyone had a television or even a telephone at home, and consequently we all had much more time to ourselves, untouched by the world 'out there'. There are advantages and disadvantages to that, but seeing how many people of all ages on public transport nowadays who spend their entire time buried in a screen and not seeing or engaging with the world around them is remarkable.
It is interesting to wonder whether someone seeking to write a book set in the 1980s, and covering the same ground as Cooper in Rivals, would write a book that is in any way similar to the one that she penned at the time. I suspect not, as what was exciting then about her books and those of her contemporaries, and remains fascinating about them now, is that they were trying to capture an era while it took place. They were not attempting to self-consciously construct something but merely set down what they saw around them, and the sights, tastes, sounds and smells that filled the air at the time.
This sense of the world as it was then came back to me in a rush this weekend, when a chance discovery reminded me of another author who was hugely popular in the 1980s.
Dick Francis was a highly successful National Hunt jockey, riding for HM Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, among others, who switched the saddle for the pen on his retirement and wrote a series of crime novels centred on horse racing.
While I heading to my local park, I saw, trampled and clearly run over by a bike or two, a page torn from his 1989 classic Straight.
As I read it, it struck me just how much literary styles have changed since then. The preoccupations of the era—money, power and sex—remain the same but the way they are discussed has altered enormously, to the extent that I wondered if people really spoke like that at the time.
Perhaps they did, but definitely not round our way.
P-Wave Press
The second of the author's Rutshire Chronicles series, it is a steamy romp set in the cutthroat world of independent television, in which a heartthrob TV presenter, Declan O'Hara (played by Aidan Turner of Poldark fame) is roped into working at the failing Corinium television studios by its crooked owner, the aptly named Lord Baddingham, played by David Tennant. The cast also includes Alex Hassell as his rival, the ex-Olympian and Tory MP Rupert Campbell-Black, and Nafessa Williams, who plays the glamorous producer Cameron Cook.
Breathless articles in the mainstream media, but also Good Housekeeping magazine, Tatler and even (or perhaps naturally) Horse and Hound, attest to how much excitement there is in the air about this return to a decade that has been much mythologised in the intervening years.
Fortunately, it seems that the production team, and Disney, have recognised that they should do the book, and the era, justice in this onscreen version.
"Unlike previous dramatisations of my work, when my characters and plots have been changed out of all recognition, the spirit of my original novel is alive and well," Cooper said in Vogue recently. "From cast to script, the world of the late ’80s has been vividly brought back to life."
She continues: "And what a world it was. Now in my late 80s, I would need my walking stick to fend off any lecherous advances. Rereading Rivals, I was transported back in time and both amazed and shocked by how things have changed in the past nearly four decades."
Cooper explains: "Back then, as I remember it, everyone seemed to be partying, smoking, having long wine-fuelled lunches and masses and masses of sex."
She goes on to bemoan the replacement of boozy lunches with "actual working lunches and the sex with speed swiping, which has taken a lot of fun and mischief out of the world."
It is of course hard to look back at the 1980s, or any decade for that matter, and get a true sense of the lives that people actually lived.
In some ways, the 80s are as remote to us now as are the 1940s or the 1880s. Life as it was lived then was fundamentally different, even if most people weren't living life in the fast lane and horsing around (literally and metaphorically) at the weekends.
For me, one of the most important differences between then and now is that people were much less aware of themselves as a construct and how they appeared to others. They simply acted and spoke as they saw fit, and so were much more 'individual' than they are now, even if society itself was in many ways much more conformist and far less tolerant of difference.
And of course there is the internet and mass communication, which is mentioned so often in this context that it has become something of a cliché. Yet it is undeniable that the invasion of media into our pockets and daily lives has changed so much of the way we interact with the world.
In the 80s, not everyone had a television or even a telephone at home, and consequently we all had much more time to ourselves, untouched by the world 'out there'. There are advantages and disadvantages to that, but seeing how many people of all ages on public transport nowadays who spend their entire time buried in a screen and not seeing or engaging with the world around them is remarkable.
It is interesting to wonder whether someone seeking to write a book set in the 1980s, and covering the same ground as Cooper in Rivals, would write a book that is in any way similar to the one that she penned at the time. I suspect not, as what was exciting then about her books and those of her contemporaries, and remains fascinating about them now, is that they were trying to capture an era while it took place. They were not attempting to self-consciously construct something but merely set down what they saw around them, and the sights, tastes, sounds and smells that filled the air at the time.
This sense of the world as it was then came back to me in a rush this weekend, when a chance discovery reminded me of another author who was hugely popular in the 1980s.
Dick Francis was a highly successful National Hunt jockey, riding for HM Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, among others, who switched the saddle for the pen on his retirement and wrote a series of crime novels centred on horse racing.
While I heading to my local park, I saw, trampled and clearly run over by a bike or two, a page torn from his 1989 classic Straight.
As I read it, it struck me just how much literary styles have changed since then. The preoccupations of the era—money, power and sex—remain the same but the way they are discussed has altered enormously, to the extent that I wondered if people really spoke like that at the time.
Perhaps they did, but definitely not round our way.
P-Wave Press