Dame Jilly Cooper, 87, blames jogging for the UK’s sex drought

Dame Jilly Cooper has pointed to one active hobby as the cause of a sex drought across the UK.

Dame Jilly’s raunchy 1988 novel Rivals, has been adapted into an eight-part Disney+ series featuring an all-star cast.

Starring the likes of Aidan Turner, David Tennant, Danny Dyer, Victoria Smurfit, Emily Atack, and Katherine Parkinson, the cast is chockablock with talent – who apparently all get their kit off in this erotic drama set to air in mid-October.

Speaking about the upcoming series, Dame Jilly explained that she believed there was more sex in the 80s and suggested that in today’s day and age, tragically exercise is more of a priority than getting between the sheets.

‘Everybody jogs. They get up in the morning, they jog all around the countryside for hours. They do exercises. That’s what they do now.

‘They don’t have sex any more. They are far too tired to have sex now. Jogging is bad for people’s love life. Ruinous,’ she claimed while chatting to BBC News.

Statistics have suggested that adults are having less sex than they were decades ago, with the British Medical Journal suggesting that nearly a third of men and women have not had sex in the past month.

Although there might be several reasons as to why people in the UK are less sexually active than they once were – a medical journal has yet to blame jogging.

Despite writing the saucy text on which the show is based, Dame Jilly, has revealed that even she was surprised by the amount of sex scenes in the adaptation for Disney.

‘I did occasionally say, “No, I don’t think they should be jumping on each other quite so early in the story” and things like that,’ she revealed.

Dame Jilly served as an executive producer on the series and revealed a mile-high sex scene on a Concorde with some male buttocks proudly on display, which was not in the original text.

‘That was not in the book,’ she said. ‘It’s fun. It’s quite naughty too.’

She then teased the plot adding: ‘There is a lot of sex. In one episode they have every member of the cast coupled and fornicating for the next 20 minutes and all of that.’

Dame Jilly, who is now in her late eighties, joked that she was perhaps more surprised by the explicit nature of the series because of her age.

‘Well, 87 is very old and you do forget about sex,’ she said.

She added that now even some of her old books make her blush. ‘Books I wrote in the old days. Because I’m amazed at some of the things I wrote about. They are quite strong.’

While re-reading her original text in preparation for promotional interviews she revealed that her novel was also packed with explicit scenes.

‘Lots and lots and lots of sex,’ she gave as her brief review. ‘The 80s really were the most fun time.’

‘Masses of sex, masses of drinking, masses of parties. The younger generation all wish they had been born then.’

‘We’ve been equal opportunities in our nudity,’ writer Dominic Treadwell-Collins told The Times in an interview about the series, ‘There’s a willy for every pair of tits.’

He also teased that Katherine Parkinson’s sex scene is a particular highlight: ‘She will be garlanded with Baftas and Oscars. Honestly. And she wanted to do the sex scene.’

He continued: ‘She was like, “I really want to show my boobs. I’m in my mid-40s and they look good.” In that scene, you can see she’s crying with happiness and it makes you cry too. She looks like a f*****g queen.’