Jilly Cooper knows what women want In her books, pleasure doesn't come with a morality test

These were marks of Rupert’s caddishness in the Eighties, when both novel and series are set. Now, they’re near-insuperable taboos — the assault, obviously, but also the age gap.

By contemporary mores, Rupert Campbell-Black could be seen as not just a cad, but as a predator. As an article in Reason explained last year, a term that originally described the sexual exploitation of children by adults, “grooming”, had been stretched to apply to situations where all parties were adults. But even without his morality-offending excesses, you might wonder if there’s any room today for the kind of character he is: the charming libertine, the compulsive seducer, the overgrown manchild whose own gratification defeats all else. If Rupert fits any modern archetype, it’s the “fuckboy”, defined by journalist Nancy Jo Sales as “a young man who sleeps with women without any intention of having a relationship with them or perhaps even walking them to the door post-sex. He’s a womanizer, an especially callous one, as well as kind of a loser.” A “fuckboy” is not someone to be desired.

The new romantic hero can be found in the pages of Sally Rooney — Cooper’s successor, in that she’s the contemporary queen of the dirty book, but a very different kind of novelist. In a Rooney story, you’re only supposed to be turned on by what’s good for you. “The reader is never quite able to shake the suspicion that Rooney’s characters have all been made to sign contracts holding them to high standards of personal conduct before they are permitted to appear on the page,” noted the critic James Marriott. In the words of Ann Manov, Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, offers “two supposedly problematic males who make love tenderly and give love fiercely”. In other words, not that problematic at all.

You certainly can’t imagine a Rooney character killing a fox or groping a server and being rewarded for it with a throbbingly hot sex scene. And so, in order to make Rupert Campbell-Black palatable to modern tastes, the TV show has changed… well, actually it’s changed almost nothing. The Rupert played by Alex Hassell is, with a few tweaks, the Rupert of Jilly Cooper’s novels, right down to the saucy banter. In the opening scene, after joining the mile-high club on Concorde with the journalist employed to ghost his memoir, Rupert smirks: “I always believe in laying one’s ghost.” It’s a line that comes directly from the book.

Olivia Nuzzi, the New York Magazine journalist who lost her job after allegedly sexting one of her subjects, the one-time presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, might feel some nostalgia for Jillyworld. In Jillyworld, sex can be just fun. Yes, people fall in love ill-advisedly and get hurt, usually by Rupert Campbell-Black — it wouldn’t be any fun if there weren’t any risk involved. But for Cooper’s characters, erotic possibility is everywhere, and pleasure doesn’t come with a morality test. In a later episode, Lizzie (a romantic novelist and Cooper proxy, played by Katherine Parkinson) looks around a garden party and wonders if everyone there is committing adultery: the answer is probably yes, and the implication is that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Part of the pleasure of Rivals is the sheer relief of this position, after a slew of dramas such as The Affair and Apple Tree Yard which have portrayed infidelity as not only a severe ethical infraction, but the portal to a total unravelling of the protagonists’ lives. While the conventional romantic novel ends with marriage (or, if you’re Sally Rooney and marriage seems intolerably basic, then at least with a vague suggestion that a couple is now in it for the long haul), for Cooper, marriage is just the background for illicit desire and more potential couplings — which is why she’s been able to return to the same cast of characters for so long now.

Even if someone in her novels does try to stay faithful, it’s very unlikely that their partner is doing the same. In Cooper’s saucily pragmatic universe, the happiest union might well be the one with a little room for indiscretion on both sides; the most convincing forms of monogamy often occur between people who are married to other people. This might not be a model that many of us would like our own spouse to follow, but it is undeniably quite sexy. Some might even argue that “being quite sexy” is the whole purpose of romantic fiction — or at least, a more important part of its purpose than training female audiences to fit their pleasures to their morals.

This version of Rivals has also arrived almost exactly as the trend for “bad vibes TV” (as the critic Sophie Gilbert has called it) has reached exhaustion point. “Lately,” she wrote, “TV has felt to me like one long bad trip, a season of moody episodic rhapsodies that eschew the conventional architecture of narrative for something more subliminal, and more disturbing.” Shows such as The Bear and The Lady in the Lake have become fixated on inflicting their characters’ trauma on the audience, at the expense of storytelling and entertainment. One thing you can be very sure of with Cooper is that you won’t be encountering a brutalising dream sequence or an experimental rendering of grief psychosis. In Rutshire, people pull their socks up when bad things happen.

Perhaps Rupert Campbell-Black isn’t a hero out of time: he’s a hero just in time. The Eighties he belongs to might never have really existed but the fantasy he represents still does. As the number of shapely male bums on show demonstrates, Rivals is absolutely designed for the female gaze, and the female gaze (it’s fair to say) is tired of being hectored. The female gaze would like to be free to want bad things, and not be told that there’s a terrible price to pay for getting them. The female gaze is ready to have fun again.

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Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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