Why on earth would you cut the sex scenes from Jilly Cooper?
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Perhaps you fast forward through sex scenes like a certain member of my family. ‘Can’t be doing with all that,’ she says, pressing down firmly on the remote.
In which case, you won’t be interested in the news about the Jilly Cooper adaptation currently being filmed by Disney.
If you can manage the odd sex scene without reaching for the remote control, you might be interested to learn that Disney executives are said to be horrified by the amount of sex in Rivals, and have ordered various scenes to be re-shot.
According to a report, various racy moments in the eight-part adaptation are being redone because executives have found them ‘a bit much.’
As a source says ‘It was a very different world in the 1980s when the book was written, so there were always going to be issues in getting it right for today’s viewers.’
Did anybody at Disney flick through a copy of Rivals before giving it the green light? Complaining that there’s too much sex in a Jilly Cooper novel is like complaining that there are too many rich landowners looking for wives in Austen. The sex is the point.
Not the whole point, perhaps, because there are dastardly TV executives and Cotswold houses and Rupert Campbell-Black in Rivals too. But there is quite a bit of sex, and understandably it feels quite 1980s because it was published in 1988.
There are also shoulder pads, Wham! and substantial age gaps between certain characters, plus syllabub for pudding, and the intense whiff of Fracas wafting from every page. First they came for Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming. Now they’re coming for Jilly.
It’s so prudish and censorious, the idea that we can’t deal with watching sex scenes that are too ‘raunchy’. What does raunchy mean in this context, anyway? It’s quite a subjective word.
Early on in Rivals, a woman climbs off her titled lover and drawls the line ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord’. Is a snippet from a 19th century hymn and a pun on the chap’s title too raunchy? I think it’s funny, as is a lot of sex in Jilly’s book.
In Mount, a woman refers to one man’s ‘leaning tower of pleasure.’ In Riders, there’s a description of Campbell-Black going at it ‘like an express tunnel into a train’. In Jump, meanwhile, it’s ‘like a speedboat plunging into a warm ocean.’ Dame Jilly is a big fan of a transport simile.
Dame Jilly, you see? She’s even been given a damehood for services to sex. OK, not quite. She was made a Dame in last year’s honours list for services to literature and charity.
But the reason she’s sold quite so many millions of those books is because she writes jolly, amusing, escapist stories that largely celebrate sex. That aren’t afraid of sex, or coy, or deeply and exhaustingly po-faced about it like so many people seem to be now.
At Cheltenham last week, I talked to someone who’d once quizzed Jilly about how she wrote her love scenes. ‘Well darling,’ she told him huskily, ‘I have had a lot of sex.’ She’s a terrific example of someone who doesn’t take herself too seriously in an age when a good number of people take themselves much too seriously indeed.
Here’s a question: would you rather your teenage child learned about sex by watching porn online these days, or by picking up a book written by Jilly?
Sure, they may develop some quite weird ideas about train travel if they flick through Riders, but that’s almost certainly still more wholesome than the content they’ll find online. As a young, baffled sort, she certainly helped me and a good number of others get their heads around this peculiar grown-up act which we didn’t understand but desperately wanted to.
She set the standard for plenty of other writers to follow, too. When I started writing romantic comedy novels, I wanted my sex scenes to be similarly entertaining and make readers laugh. When Dame Jilly duly gave me a quote for my first novel (‘the sex makes me feel like a nun’), I felt like I’d been anointed by the Pope.
That book came out in 2018, but the landscape has changed so much since that, in my forthcoming novel, I haven’t included a single sex scene.
It’s partly because I can’t face spending another week in a sound-proofed booth recording the audio version, reading my own sex scenes aloud while a 20-something sound technician in the adjacent booth listens along and tells me to repeat a line if I fluff a word (‘Can we just go back to the bit where you sai—’ ‘YES, don’t worry, I know exactly which line you mean.’)
But it’s also because laughing or even making jokes about sex feels more dangerous now. One can so easily be criticised or cancelled for a perceived lack of sensitivity that I decided it was easier to do without, that readers can simply imagine what goes on after a bedroom door closes.
Wimpy, perhaps, but I didn’t want to try and write a sex scene just to keep the morality police happy. It’s not a very natural way to write, that.
Certain contemporary writers do it brilliantly. Sally Rooney is often singled out and praised, and the TV adaptation of Normal People, her second novel, was rightly celebrated for its thoughtful depiction of sex between the two young protagonists.
So much so that a friend tells me her daughter’s school used scenes from the TV series to teach them about sex. I don’t imagine they’ll be doing the same with the adaptation of Rivals when it’s released, but why should they?
Jilly Cooper has written a book about a certain kind of sex; Sally Rooney wrote another. Surely there’s space for both onscreen? Surely viewers can make their own minds up about the sex involved in Rivals, without being subjected to the knee-jerk decisions of nervous TV executives?
Not the member of my family who fast forwards through them, though. She won’t be watching it at all.
