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).