My wild night with Rupert Campbell-Black

... a few thousand strangers and Dame Jilly. All I learned about how to be more Cooper direct from the Rivals creator and crew

Like every other British woman* and, it seems, most of British Substack**, I have been watching Rivals. Of course I have been watching Rivals! I even signed up to Disney+ despite their terrifying sign-away-your-life contract to do so. And I am so glad that they adapted Rivals, and somehow*** had the foresight to do so, as opposed to any of the famously horsey-themed Cooper oeuvre (Riders, Polo, Jump! the list goes on), because picking her 1988 hit Rivals - about the battle to win a TV franchise in the Cotswolds, of all things - shows that somebody behind all this - an executive, Providence, God maybe - truly understands Jilly Cooper.

Because Rivals is absolutely the great Jilly Cooper’s greatest work.

I do not say this lightly. This I've known pretty much ever since I liberated my copy from my school’s lost property, which sums up a lot of women's first experiences of Jilly Cooper: contraband, adult, slightly illicit (how had it ended up in the boxes spread around the sports hall, this…