‘Swingers would throw sex parties with a lamb casserole bubbling away on the Aga’

As Jilly Cooper jodhpur-ripper Rivals hits screens, we asked locals what they think of its depiction of a sexed-up Cotswolds

“As he slid inside her, she felt all the amazed joy of a canal lock suddenly finding it can accommodate the QE2,” writes Jilly Cooper of priapic MP Rupert Campbell-Black’s conquest of shoulder-padded New York TV producer Cameron Cook in her novel Rivals, which has been adapted in gloriously outré fashion for Disney+. And you’ve got to hand it to her, no other living novelist could weave canal infrastructure, landmark cruise vessels and unapologetic smut into a metaphor but the doyen of the jodhpur-splitting romance oeuvre, now aged 87. 
The big-budget TV iteration of Rivals, the second of Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles (after equestrian bonkbuster Riders, which was televised in the 90s), stars David Tennant as TV exec Anthony Lord Baddingham; stage actor Alex Hassell as arch competitor Campbell-Black; Poldark’s Aidan Turner as TV presenter Declan O’Hara; and The Inbetweeners’ Emily Atack as adulterous wife Sarah Stratton, whom we encounter in the first episode playing full-frontal naked tennis with the roguish Rupert. Rivals the TV series is a joyous riot of thrusting bums in Concorde loos and flowing Buck’s Fizz: all soundtracked by the pounding strains of Robert Palmer and Wham! 
It’s the perfect escapist fare for our greyer times. It’s also a love letter to Jilly Cooper’s Cotswolds. The novelist and husband Leo moved to The Chantry, a 15th-century manor house in the Cotswolds village of Bisley, in 1982, leaving behind London’s Putney.
The centre of the action in the 1988 novel is (with little in the way of punning subtlety) Rutshire, a loosely fictionalised Cotswolds, and principally its county town Cotchester, thought to be modelled on Tetbury, with its “wide streets and ancient pale gold houses”, fine Queen Anne buildings and cathedral with “the shadow of its spire on bright days lying like a benediction over the town”.
The TV adaptation lingers, in a similar vein, over its setting: we enjoy panning shots of helicopters landing on a green counterpane of fields, honeystone cottages gilded by soft English sunlight, sun-drenched wheat fields, handsome neoclassical piles (such as the HQ of Corinium TV, the corporate around which the action centres) and manicured gardens.
Contrasting with the wholesomeness of the natural setting, Cooper’s Cotchesterians are, of course, all highly sexed. There are six OTT lovemaking sessions in the first episode of the TV adaptation alone, including a memorable threesome featuring podgy tech mogul Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer). 
The Rivals countryfolk are seldom content with bedding down with their own spouses or turning in with a cup of cocoa at 9pm. So what do Cotswolds folk think of this sexed-up depiction?
“We used to have a saying in my younger Cheltenham days,” laughs company director Esther Fox, 45, now based in Devon. “If the horse box is rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’!” Fox lived in the Cotswolds through her twenties, studying at Hartford Agricultural college and riding out (exercising the horses) for a leading trainer who owned a red BMW and, she recalls, could have stepped out of a Jilly Cooper novel, with his blouson leather jacket, wraparound Ray Bans and roguish twinkle. 
“I was totally smitten with him,” Fox laughs. Fox adds that the Cotswolds set she knew then were “frankly, at it all the time”. She continues: “There were affairs left, right and centre – people bedding their horse trainers, horny huntsmen, hornier agricultural students, and swingers who would throw sex parties with a lamb casserole bubbling away on the aga. It was wild and totally [like Cooper’s novel] Riders.” 
Cotswolds retiree and former mayor of Fairford (in Gloucestershire), Chris Roberts, 74, reckons the Cotswolds continues to live up to its saucy reputation. A well-known model who lives near to Roberts, and whom she wouldn’t name, has caused chaos with road closures for her hedonistic private parties and a boy band member recently threw an extravagant birthday bacchanalia. “It became an orgy,” she recounts, “and locals soon all knew about it”. 
The difference between now and the bed-hopping 1980s, in Roberts’ view, is that today’s celebrity Cotswolds incomers are more discreet about their antics. “They all live in these gated compounds rather than within the community,” she says. “But of course, things get out!”
According to a January 2024 survey of Britons’ sexual habits, the friskiest counties in the UK were (hilariously) Rutland (where residents have sex an average of 2.69 times a week), Berkshire (2.37 times) and Buckinghamshire (2.31 times), with Cotswolds heartland county Gloucestershire seeing its residents enjoy a roll in the hay an average of 1.28 times a week.
However, perhaps we need to ask with whom these trysts are being conducted, as a 2017 index from Illicit Affairs, a website for married people seeking extramarital hook-ups, cited Gloucester as the UK’s “most adulterous city”. Fox speculates that the high level of adultery she witnessed in her Cotswolds horsewoman years came down to money. “If you have a sprawling estate, you don’t want to break great hunks of that estate off by going through a divorce,” she says. “So you have an affair instead and keep the land intact.”
Susan C Law, the author of Through the Keyhole: Sex, Scandal and the Secret Life of the Country House (2017, The History Press), says that the fascination with the sex lives of posh country dwellers stretches back to the 1700s. From 1789, Town and Country magazine lavishly recounted the scandalous sexual conquests of the landed aristocracy for a rapt city readership. In the 19th century, scandals involving Cotswolds dwellers included the notorious case of Jane Digby (1807-1881), the beautiful young wife of Edward Lord Ellenborough of Gloucestershire, who bedded, amongst others, European aristocrats, royals, brigands and a Bedouin chief. 
The ill-fated lord and lady’s former seat is now a luxury spa hotel, Ellenborough Park.  “There was an obsession with these [rich country folk’s] love lives as it was all about the transmission of power,” Law explains. “Sons who would inherit a seat in parliament needed to be rightful heirs.”  
With the Cotwolds’ star turn in Rivals, the region’s hospitality providers are getting in on the action, with an array of impressive, erm, packages. They include cottage provider Luxury Cotswold Rentals, which has released its “top picks of the sexiest houses in the Cotswolds”. 
They include Hanks House in Chipping Norton, which has a massage room, swimming pool and hot tub and sleeps 14 for £20,000 per week, and tucked-away Dovecote Cottage Duns Tew, which sleeps two people from £600 for a two-night stay and features a “romantic double in the eaves”. Calcot Manor & Spa, in Tetbury, for its part, is offering a romantic Rivals Sunday Spa Break for couples, from £504 per night for two, with a pair of 25-minute treatments and a pert banger on the breakfast buffet (well that’s not a guarantee, though a hearty à la carte breakfast comes with the deal).
So fillies, as Rupert might murmur, book a well-sprung four-poster and put the date in the Filofax. Bottoms up!Rivals is out now on Disney +.