Into the cut-throat world of Corinium television come Declan O'Hara, a mega-star of great glamour and integrity with a radiant feckless wife, a handsome son and two ravishing teenage daughters. Living rather too close across the valley is Rupert Campbell-Black, divorced and as dissolute as ever, and now the Tory Minister for Sport.
Declan only needs a few days at Corinium to realise that the Managing Director, Lord Baddingham, is a crook who has recruited him merely to help retain the franchise for Corinium when it comes up next year. Baddingham has also enticed Cameron Cook, a gorgeous but domineering woman executive, to produce Declan's programme. Declan and Cameron detest each other, provoking a storm of controversy into which Rupert plunges with his usual abandon.
As a rival group emerges to pitch for the franchise, reputations ripen and decline, true love blossoms and burns, marriages are made and shattered, and sex raises its (delicious) head at almost every throw as, in bed and boardroom, the race is on to capture the Cotswold Crown.
In Jilly Cooper's sparkling outrageous novel of life behind the television screen, her ingenuity and mastery of social innuendo is at full throttle.