Basically, there was trouble at \u2019mill. Or at least t\u2019mill owner\u2019s house. This is the fons et origo of Barbara Taylor Bradford\u2019s A Woman of Substance. The quintessential rags-to-riches tale, of impoverished Yorkshire lass Emma Harte making her way to the top of the fashion business, was published in 1979 \u2013 but it anticipated and appealed instantly to the self-improving, bootstrap-straining, money-hungry, power-mad, ambition-laden mood of the decade to come. It was first adapted for television in 1985 (starring Jenny Seagrove and Deborah Kerr as Emmas young and old) and now it is time for another. Katherine Jakeways and Roanne Bardsley have delivered an eight-part miniseries whose lavish absurdity takes us back to the supreme madness of 80s television and gives us the escapism we surely all currently crave.<\/p>\n
We open in the late 70s with Emma Harte in a limousine and her multimillionaire grande dame prime. She is played by Brenda Blethyn, who has, at last, cast off her drab Vera<\/a> garb and shuffling gait after 14 series. Instead, she has embraced a gorgeous silver-grey bouffant wig and equally lavish wardrobe, with, I hope, all the joy that such a metamorphosis can bring.<\/p>\n A young man leaps into the car to give us some exposition. Emma is the richest woman in the world! But! A mole has leaked Emma\u2019s medical records, suggesting she is physically on the skids. Harte shares are plummeting! \u201cThe papers are saying you\u2019re finished!\u201d Emma marches into her steel and marble headquarters in what is absolutely New York and not Liverpool, and tells her minions that they need to \u201ccontrol the narrative\u201d with press releases. I\u2019m not sure that phrase was in use in 1970-anything but I\u2019m not about to argue with that wig, so on we go.<\/p>\n The young expositor is Jim Fairley (Toby Regbo), a member of the Fairley family, with whom Emma has a longstanding feud. \u201cWhat I\u2019ve dedicated my life to,\u201d she says, narrowing her eyes in a way that hasn\u2019t been done properly since Dynasty, as Fairley pleads for a chance to befriend her, \u201cis revenge.\u201d<\/p>\n Oh God, I miss the past.<\/p>\n To find out what in the nurtured-vengeance is going on, we flashback to 1911 and a manor house seething with sexual tension and drunken wives in the middle of the Yorkshire moors. I am hopeful I will get to use the \u201cPenistone Frag?\u201d joke I have been working on since I saw Margot Robbie relieving her Heathcliff-based frustrations alone on a rocky promontory.<\/p>\n Jessica Reynolds as the young Emma Harte. Photograph: Sam Taylor\/Channel 4\/The Forge<\/p>\n At this stage Emma (Jessica Reynolds) is no but a serving wench at the house, which is owned \u2013 along with t\u2019mill and most of t\u2019people within a 10-mile radius \u2013 by the Fairleys. She has a dying mam (Sophie Bould) who uses her last breath to urge her daughter to \u201cget out and get on\u201d, in quite the most unashamedly cliched deathbed scene there has been since deathbed scenes first gathered their cliches. I was not moved in the slightest but I did revel in the sight of such perfectly terrible melodrama.<\/p>\n