Best-selling author Jilly Cooper claims everybody was having sex and affairs in the 80s but people hardly “bonk” anymore.
The 87-year-old novelist is celebrating a TV adaptation of her novel Rivals which will see David Tennant play the role of ruthless businessman Lord Baddingham who is the controller of Corinium Television.
Poldark’s Aidan Turner also stars in the series which will air on Disney+ from October 18.
Cooper said: “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!”
In the interview in the latest issue of Vogue, she adds: “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.”
Written 40 years ago, Baddingham is 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.
“Now in my late 80s, I would need my walking stick to fend off any lecherous advances,” Cooper said. “Rereading Rivals, I was transported back in time and both amazed and shocked by how things have changed in the past nearly four decades.
“Back then, as I remember it, everyone seemed to be partying, smoking, having long wine-fuelled lunches and masses and masses of sex.
“But today, the boozy lunches have been replaced with actual working lunches and the sex with speed swiping, which has taken a lot of fun and mischief out of the world.”
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