Rivals filming locations: Is Rutshire fictional and can I visit the countryside set in real life?
RIVALS has been a smash hit on Disney plus and fans are clamouring to visit the Cotswolds town that the show’s characters call home.
Jilly Cooper’s series is set in the town of Rutshire, which is said to be somewhere in the South West, but fans may run into trouble if they try to visit.
Country living
Rutshire is a fictional town that doesn’t actually exist, so fans of the series won’t be able to visit.
However, the show was filmed across Gloucestershire and Wiltshire so fans can visit the stunning countryside settings that were the backdrop of some of the show’s raciest moments.
The show’s team wanted Rutshire to be quite different to the typical idea of an English village.
Their vision was of a town that was “as full of ravishing countryside as it is workaholics and their bored spouses, where Barbour jackets do battle with fast cars and buckets of champagne”.
Home of scandal
Rivals is based on a book of the same name which was first released in 1988 and written by the “Queen of the bonkbuster” Dame Jilly Cooper.
The book and TV series follow a group of aristocratic characters whose petty rivalries and illicit affairs become an interwoven tapestry of deceit.
Lord Tony Baddingham (played by David Tennant) becomes locked in a bitter battle for control of a TV with an Olympic showjumper named Rupert Campbell-Black (played by Alex Hassel).
Their feud draws in characters played by Danny Dyer, Emily Atack, Katherine Parkinson, Aiden Turner and Nafessa Williams.
Soon the calm of their Cotwolds town is rocked by the characters’ self-destructive habits and decadent lifestyles.
The show engages with contemporary issues too, referencing homophobia and sexual assault in the workplace and presenting the inequalities of life in the 1980s.
Dame Jilly Cooper
Dame Jilly Cooper is the author of the Rutshire chronicles which follow Rupert Campbell-Black’s scandalous lifestyle in the Cotswolds.
She was born in Hornchurch, Essex, on February 21, 1937, and had several careers before getting her big break as the writer of Riders and Rivals.
Jilly worked as a journalist, a publisher’s assistant and a non-fiction author.
Her books were so successful that she was made a Dame in 2004.
She even appears in the TV adaptation of Rivals in episode 5 when Katherine Parkinson’s character, Lizzie Vereker, goes to meet her book editor (played by Felicity Kendall).
The camera pans to Dame Jilly Cooper’s shocked face when Felicity’s character reads aloud from Lizzie’s saucy book.