Jilly Cooper

As Rupert Campbell-Black is immortalised on our screens, the bestselling author tells Martha Terry about her own showjumping exploits, real-life inspirations and the day she lost her manuscript on a bus

- Martha Terry

“I SN’T he the handsomest man in England?” Dame Jilly Cooper cocks her head to one side and asks me playfully. She’s sitting on a sofa in a London hotel next to actor Alex Hassell, who plays her caddish hero Rupert Campbell-Black in the new TV adaptation of her 1988 bestseller, Rivals. While I splutter some sort of affirmative response, she purrs on, blue eyes twinkling. “Rupert is the handsomest man in England, though rather beastly, and look at this darling child! He is gorgeous isn’t he?”

It’s hard not to feel I’ve been transplanted into playing Hugh Grant in Notting Hill here. In a hotel room with a superstar (or two) and trying to talk about horses in a film that doesn’t really have an equestrian theme – except that I really do work for Horse & Hound. Soothingly, Jilly validates my presence, pulling out a piece of paper from a canvas bag, branded National Racehorse Week, which she’d attended the previous week.

“I wanted to bring you this,” she says and hands me a photocopy of the first page of the first novel in the Rutshire Chronicles, Riders, pointing to the text where “tattered piles of Horse & Hound” lie on Jake Lovell’s floor.

Because Jilly absolutely adores horses. Starting out with showjumping in Riders in 1985, Jilly has returned to horse sport again and again throughout her oeuvre, from Polo (1991) to the National Hunt world in Jump! (2010) and Flat racing in Mount! (2016).

“You know, I don’t have a very good imagination, I like to have been there,” she smiles. “And I just love horses. They are so beautiful. I go and talk to them on my walks and stroke them.”

Growing up in the era of Pat Smythe and Anneli Drummond-Hay, Jilly was herself a keen showjumper as a girl, but serious injury put paid to her achieving the dizzy heights of her protagonists.