Jilly Cooper
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2016
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young’s castaway is the writer Jilly Cooper.
Her long writing career spans newspaper columns for the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday, non-fiction books on class, marriage and animals in war and novels that sell in their millions. Her romances set in the late seventies - including 'Bella', 'Harriett', 'Imogen' and 'Prudence' – were followed by 'Riders' in 1985, the first of her Rutshire Chronicles. Set mainly in the Cotswolds, they are racy and raunchy page-turners exposing the scandalous – and often hilarious - goings on among the British upper classes.
Born in 1937 in Essex, she was brought up in Yorkshire and enjoyed a happy childhood surrounded by dogs and ponies. At boarding school she earned the nickname, ‘the unholy terror’ and having failed to get into Oxford and being sacked from a number of jobs for her inability to type, she turned to journalism before publishing her first book, 'How to Stay Married' in 1969.
She married Leo Cooper in 1961 and, unable to have children of their own, the couple adopted Felix and Emily in the late 1960s. The couple were married for 52 years before his death in 2013.
Producer: Cathy Drysdale
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:03.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. |
| 0:05.0 | Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:09.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:14.3 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co. UK slash radio4. Radio 4. My castaway this week is the writer Jillie Cooper. She has been rattling out bestsellers for 30 years, filling them with heroes, horses, |
| 0:46.3 | dogs and sex. |
| 0:47.3 | Her tales of make-believe tofts and their ribbled shenanigans are full of wit and warmth, and set in a Cotswold world populated by dashing |
| 0:55.6 | cads with glittering eyes and women in sleek jodpers and ravishing ball gowns who really |
| 1:00.8 | ought to know better. Her books have sold in their multi-million's and |
| 1:04.8 | although she takes around four years to research and write each one, she must |
| 1:09.1 | surely understand instinctively the proclivities and preoccupations of their characters. |
| 1:14.0 | She too was born into what would then have been called an upper middle class family |
| 1:18.4 | and her childhood was spent among buttercpped fields populated by ponies and pets. At boarding school she earned the nickname |
| 1:25.0 | The Unholy Terror and her working life got off to a rather rickety start she was sacked from |
| 1:30.1 | 22 jobs consecutively but much like the story of her fictional heroines it all came good in the end. |
| 1:36.0 | She says, I am proud of these books. I know they're frivolous, imperfect, but people love them. |
| 1:42.0 | Maybe one day I will write something more serious but |
| 1:44.6 | basically my aim in life is to add to the sum of human happiness. So welcome |
| 1:50.0 | Julie Cooper. You did say that. Isn't it interesting? It rather good, isn't it? Not bad. We shall probe it. |
| 1:55.2 | You've sold, what is it, around about 12 million books so far? I don't know. I don't know. It changes. It seems awful lot, |
| 2:01.1 | doesn't it? Yes, it's rather a lot. |
| 2:03.0 | What do you need around you when you're writing? |
... |
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