Jilly Cooper isn't sure viewers will be able to handle the X-rated TV adaptation of her book 'Rivals'.

Jilly Cooper isn't sure viewers will be able to handle the X-rated TV adaptation of her book Rivals

Jilly Cooper isn't sure viewers will be able to handle the X-rated TV adaptation of her book Rivals

The 85-year-old star's bonkbuster is being made into an eight-part series by Disney+, which see is overseeing, but she thinks audiences are "much more rigid" nowadays.

Jilly said: "They’re much more rigid - much more censorious. I don’t know about sex, you can’t say anything about anything. You daren't."

She joked: "I think they still have sex, people? I don’t know."

Jilly has been working on a football novel, 'Tackle', for years.

The star insists her publishers have asked her to include more X-rated scenes, but joked she has "forgotten" all about sex.

She added to the Daily Mirror newspaper: "The problem is my football book... I keep getting told to put more sex in it, from my publisher. I’m 85. I’ve forgotten how to do it."

In August, it was revealed Disney are to adapt the novelist's 1988 book 'Rivals', and it will be executive produced by Jilly, former 'EastEnders' boss Dominic Treadwell-Collins and ex-'Ackley Bridge' producer Alexander Lamb.

Jilly said at the time: "I am so, so excited.

"Throughout my childhood, my favourite word was ‘Disney’, and by a miraculous coincidence, greater-than-ever Disney are joining forces with an utterly brilliant drama company, Happy Prince, to turn my novel into a TV series.

"I know they will bring the boardroom battles and love triangles of my characters to life – particularly those of my devastatingly handsome hero.

"I cannot wait to see who will be stepping into his shoes ... let the hunt for our Rupert Campbell-Black commence!"

'Rivals' will be set in 1986 in the fictional upper-class county of Rutshire where a long-standing rivalry between two powerful men, notorious womaniser Rupert Campbell-Black, and his neighbour Tony Baddingham, controller of the independent TV franchise Corinium Television, is set to boil over.

The series is expected to bring a 2020s lens to the 1980s.