When I moved from London to the West Country in the ’80s with my late husband, Leo, and my children, Felix and Emily, I found sex as prolific outside of marriage as in. Everywhere I looked people seemed to be committing both adultery and fornication – even the animals in the fields seemed to be at it, and not just the rabbits.
I was amazed to meet a glamorous peer who, when he got married for a fourth time, asked all of his three ex-wives to sleep with him as a wedding present. I remember a dinner where the hosts, bitterly rowing one moment, had sloped off upstairs for a shag between courses (giving a whole new meaning to the term inter-course). I also remember being very disappointed after an attractive man was showing an interest in me, but when he asked me to a dinner party to meet his wife, she immediately informed me that her husband had received 35 Valentines earlier that year: “Keep off the grass!”
These were the people who became the inspiration for my bestselling 1988 novel, Rivals – a tale of challenging misbehaviour to uncover secrets in the world of television – kindly described by the Daily Mail at the time as “a gloriously sexy rampage through the Cotswold countryside backed by the excitement of an exceptionally well researched account of the backstabbing and ruthless machinations behind a television franchise battle”.
In the story, Lord Baddingham is the controller of Corinium Television, a ruthless businessman far more interested in making a fortune from advertising and terrorising his staff than producing good programmes. To help him to win his renewal bid for a franchise, he poaches Irish megastar Declan O’Hara from the BBC, who moves his beautiful but bored wife, Maud, to the Cotswolds, along with his two pretty daughters. What follows is prolific battles in both boardrooms and bedrooms as everyone struggles to stay on top.
Almost 40 years on from when I first sat down to write it, Rivals has been adapted for TV by Disney+. The brilliant David Tennant takes on Lord Baddingham and Aidan Turner – he of Poldark and handsome fame – is Declan O’Hara. 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. From cast to script, the world of the late ’80s has been vividly brought back to life.
