Blame me (and Jilly Cooper) for the orgy of bonkbusters on our screens (2024)

About 30 years ago, the novelist Jilly Cooper and I were in a BBC Radio studio together. As two young tech blokes wrestled with the equipment, Jilly leaned conspiratorially into my ear and, in her gorgeous deep, plummy voice, inquired: 'Which of these chaps would you say was the most f***able?'

I was shocked. Back then, the f-word wasn't sprayed around the way it is now. It was a different era, one I think of as BC (Before Clarkson). But, equally, I was delighted by her irresistible sauciness.

Jilly was recently made a Dame and described receiving the honour from King Charles as 'org*smic' – proving age cannot wither her, Jilly's still a Very Naughty Girl.

Of course, Jilly is known as the Queen of the Bonkbuster, with her shamelessly ­double-entendre book titles – Tackle! Mount! Score!

They are stories of rich, horsey people who live in Rutshire – Jilly's wonderfully unsubtle fictionalised county full of riding whip trysts and bed-hopping, but in fact so obviously her beloved Cotswolds.

Later this year, Disney+ is screening an eight-part series based on Jilly's book Rivals. The appeal of her novels crosses the generations – even Rishi Sunak is a big fan, having said: 'You need escapism in your life.'

For anyone who takes offence at the word 'bonkbuster', I'm afraid I am to blame. A couple of decades ago, I wrote a column in The Guardian under a pseudonym as a writer of sexy historical blockbusters, which I described as 'bonkbusters'.

In truth, I hate the word 'bonk' – it sounds like a bookcase falling downstairs. Still, it caught on and it's now in the dictionary.

Today, the genre seems to be flushed with a second wind. But in the age of the #MeToo movement, can the bonkbuster really reprise its giddy heyday of the 1980s?

One of its earliest examples is Forever Amber, by Kathleen Winsor, published in 1944. Set in the reign of Charles II, it is a bodice-ripper, following a beautiful country girl up to London where her bodice is ripped incessantly. But Amber is a survivor, an anti-heroine, savvy and immoral. Fourteen US states banned the book as p*rnography and, naturally, American soldiers away from home in the war were panting to read it.

In Jacqueline Susann's Valley Of The Dolls (1966), three New York girls are determined to make it in showbusiness and to fall in love – but the book ends on a downward spiral of drugs and despair.

It was published in a peacetime world where the Sexual Revolution was under way, but still provoked moral outrage from small-town prudes who saw it as a 'dirty book'. Today's young would never believe the deep puritanism in which we Boomers grew up.

In 1963, the year in which, according to poet Philip Larkin, 'sexual intercourse began', I was a nerdy schoolgirl writing essays about Shakespeare. hom*osexuality was illegal and illegitimacy a shameful secret. When my mother came to my room to tell me a family member 'had to get married', her opening gambit was: 'Switch the light out, I've got something to tell you.'

Divorce was shameful, too. Shirley Conran, bonkbuster author and the legendary ­creator of the Daily Mail's Femail pages who died last month aged 91, had to put up with the corseted views of her parents. Her mother told her:

'Perhaps it's as well your father's dead because otherwise you couldn't have got divorced.'

Maybe the rising success of bonkbusters in the 1970s and 1980s was the Boomers' celebration of true sexual liberation. As society became more open, tolerant and louche, with the f-word routinely deployed even on cooking shows, so the bonkbuster became more graphic, delving fearlessly into the characters' underwear.

As children, my generation had devoured Lady Chatterley's Lover by torchlight under the bedclothes. Now we could boldly read Jackie Collins' Hollywood Wives on the train, and nobody would turn a hair. In fact, many other passengers would probably be reading it, too.

Hollywood Wives lets us peep into the glitzy and often sleazy world of the film industry: casting agents, rock stars and the gloriously named Jason Swankle who runs a male escort agency. One female character is quoted as ­saying: 'I think I'm having an org*sm from your knee.'

Billy Orsini, the protagonist of Judith Krantz's book Scruples, starts out modestly as a secretary in New York, then beds the CEO, marries him, moves to Bel Air and becomes the Queen of LA fashion.

Scruples is the name of her high-end boutique and the fashion detail is dazzling. A woman walks into a party 'with the glitter of a matador, encased in a vintage, shocking pink-and-black satin Schiaparelli, thickly encrusted with gold braid'.

For ordinary women who wear jeans and trainers most of the time, reading this kind of stuff is like secretly sipping a hot chocolate with whipped cream.

Bonkbusters are bankbusters, with film and TV rights icing the cake. Jilly Cooper has sold more than 11million books in the UK alone. Jackie Collins has sold 500million worldwide. The writers became glamorous celebs – it was fizz and canapes for these lit-chicks, not starving in a garret.

But who reads these books?

Presumably toffs do because they see their own lives portrayed – in Jilly Cooper's case, with verve and humour.

Indeed, her most infamous heartbreaker, Rupert Campbell-Black, is said to be based partially on Andrew Parker Bowles, Queen Camilla's ex. (The fact that our new Queen has an ex-husband is a symptom of the revolution our society has been through.)

We plebs, however, are drawn to the gilded scenarios of the rich and privileged because it's an escape from our humdrum lives, as our Prime Minister says. We're like Peeping Toms.

Of course, it's not great literature. But while radical feminists have deplored the 'trashy' genre, they should cheer the success of energetic go-getting women. ­Significantly, too, Shirley Conran's novel Lace celebrates the value of female friendship.

In recent years, cultural vigilantes intent on hunting down sexism, racism and issues concerning sexual consent have found plenty to infuriate them in literature. But that doesn't mean the bonkbuster is dead.

Fifty Shades Of Grey seems to have carried the torch into the 21st Century. I've only ever dipped briefly in to E. L. James's hugely successful sado-masoch*stic series beloved by millions of women, but an innocent girl abused by a sad*stic, powerful man? No thanks.

Perhaps its atmosphere of dark obsession belongs with the bloodsucking Twilight sagas, rather than the sunlit worlds of Jackie Collins's Belair or Jilly Cooper's Rutshire.

As Disney+ clearly believes, our appetite for saucy escapism is undiminished. In fact, in a darkening world where many of us can't even face watching the news any more, we might need the bonkbuster more than ever.

● Sue Limb is an author and comedy writer whose work includes the Radio 4 sitcom Gloomsbury.