Disney+’s ‘Rivals’: The Inside Story Of How A Producer Overcame The “Snobbery” Of British TV To Bring Jilly Cooper To Screen
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Disney+‘s Rivals may launch tomorrow but the Jilly Cooper adaptation has been living inside producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins’ head since he entered the TV industry 25 years ago.
Treadwell-Collins has had a stellar career including a lengthy stint running BBC soap EastEnders and the idea to adapt Cooper’s novels has always remained front and center of his mind.
But until Disney gave him the greenlight in 2022, he told Deadline he felt he was consistently coming up against the same enemy – the innate “snobbery” of British TV. “I had meetings with the BBC and ITV years ago when I didn’t have the rights and when I said, ‘Would you go for something like Jilly Cooper?’ they would look at me like I’d farted,” he said. “There’s a snobbery about her.
Throughout my career I had kept mentioning Jilly and everyone sort of laughed at and ridiculed me.” Cooper’s books, of which there are many, are often characterized as ‘bonkbusters’, a term coined in the 1980s to describe a raunchy subgenre of romance novel that has tabloid journalists licking their lips.
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