A Woman of Substance creatives discuss Channel 4 novel adaptation
Channel 4 series A Woman of Substance is an epic drama following the rise of Emma Harte from maid to mogul. Creator Katherine Jakeways and executive producer Beth Willis discuss adapting Barbara Taylor Bradford’s century-spanning novel and why the protagonist is an iconic character.
When Barbara Taylor Bradford’s 1979 novel A Woman of Substance was first adapted for television, Jenny Seagrove played the lead role of Emma Harte in a three-part miniseries that would become Channel 4’s biggest ever drama.
Now, the same broadcaster is set to debut a new eight-part adaptation. Launching on Channel 4 today, it sees Jessica Reynolds and Brenda Blethyn share the role of Emma, a housemaid turned mogul, mother, lover and fighter – and a 20th century feminist icon who refused to know her place.
The series opens in 1970s New York, when Emma (Blethyn), the richest woman in the world, discovers a plot orchestrated by her own children to take over her business empire and everything she’s fought a lifetime to build.
The story then flashes back to 1911, when young Emma (Reynolds) is a penniless maid among the household staff of Fairley Hall and is plotting her escape for a better life as she embarks on a forbidden romance with Edwin Fairley (Ewan Horrocks). Then when Emma falls pregnant and is cast away by her aristocratic lover, she vows lifelong revenge on the family she once worked for – leading her on a journey through love, loss and war to realise her unrelenting ambitions.
Produced by The Forge for Channel 4 and distributed by Banijay Rights, the series comes from creator, writer and showrunner Katherine Jakeways. She had previously partnered with The Forge on Apple TV’s The Buccaneers, and was first approached by the company’s joint MD and executive producer Beth Willis about taking a fresh look at Bradford’s novel.
“It was a book I was very aware of,” Jakeways tells DQ. “I was a kid in the 80s and was very conscious of it as a publishing sensation that everybody’s mum was reading. I was aware of the miniseries but I hadn’t read the book until lockdown, when Beth and I were working on The Buccaneers.
“I really loved the main character of Emma but I also loved it because the dual timeline is so great. You get to do the epic, romantic, passionate, huge emotional stuff from 1911, but also you get all the fun of the 70s and high-glamour, high-finance New York. That is just a lovely mix. It’s such a sprawling, exciting book in terms of story and characters. I was excited about the possibilities of it.”
Willis describes A Woman of Substance as the story of an ambitious woman who comes from nowhere to make something of herself. “We always talk about Emma Harte knowing her place. It’s not that she’s a maid, it’s that she wants to get to the top, and that summed up the brilliance of that central character,” she says. “You’ve got all of the fun, romantic things we all enjoy, but that’s not what drives her, and that just felt unique to me as a proposition.”
Through the series, scenes from the 1970s bookend the action taking place in the past – Emma’s “origin story” – that help to inform how this woman became so successful and why she’s explaining to a young man in her office that she has wanted revenge on his family for decades.
“We’ve all seen big-house shows before. We’ve all seen rags-to-riches, maids-having-relationships-with-the-gentleman-of-the-house stories before. But getting to understand why it matters to her as much as it does is a really special thing about it,” Willis says.
Those scenes also hit harder emotionally because viewers see both older Emma learning of her children’s coup against her and young Emma raising those same children. “It gives those chapters in her early life a whole new meaning,” Willis says. “You’re thinking, ‘My God, this child’s going to betray you.’”
“It’s quite emotional as well, actually,” Jakeways says. “I hadn’t really understood how well that was going to work until I saw some of those later episodes. You have the fact that her daughter [Edwina, played by Rosie Cavaliero] is leading this big coup against her, and you’ve just seen Emma give birth to her and how much she adores her, how much she’s giving up for her and how desperate she is to give her a good life.”
The writer admits she was “very conscious” of the previous C4 adaptation, which “loomed large” over this new take. But while that miniseries boiled down Emma’s story, told over nearly 900 pages in the novel, into just three episodes, this series sets up the show as a returnable drama, with this season exploring just a quarter of the novel in more than double the running time. There are a total of seven books in the Harte Family Saga that could lead to further storylines – and inform future seasons – too.
“We have picked tiny bits of character, or really tiny bits of relationship tension and stuff from the second book, and used a tiny bit of it in the 1970s bookends,” Willis says. “The book is wonderful, but there are some characters or things that happen that are wrapped up in a few lines or a paragraph. We wanted to expand them, get to know those characters more and explore what those moments of history might have been like for those characters. It just felt like there was potentially a bit more room to breathe and just to sit in that playground for longer.”
One example of the show’s expansion of Bradford’s novel is glimpsed in the opening episode as a love triangle begins to emerge between Adam Fairley (Emmett J Scanlan), his reclusive wife Adele (Leanne Best) and her sister Olivia Wainwright (Lydia Leonard).
“We’ve really let those characters sit in those feelings for longer,” Willis says, “and really enjoyed the ups and downs of these three people living in the same house, and what that means for them and their relationship.”
Jakeways penned the scripts with co-writer and co-executive producer Roanne Bardsley, each taking four episodes, after the pair previously worked together on The Buccaneers. Executive producer Joe McInnes, another familiar face from The Buccaneers, was also on hand to help break down episodes and explore the “big picture.”
“We just thought she was a really good fit for this. We don’t write together, but our skill sets are quite different and quite complementary,” Jakeways says of working with Bardsley. “She started in soap so she’s brilliant on structure and stories and being able to keep all that in her head, which I struggle with. I started in comedy and character stuff – that’s the thing I feel better at – so we are able to fill in the gaps for each other a little bit. She’s been brilliant.”
Bradford died in November 2024, but had been very involved in the early stages of the project, sharing Zoom calls with Willis and Jakeways from her home in New York.
“She read and loved the first script, which was great. I don’t think she had any notes on it,” Willis says. “Given she was a hard-bitten journalist in her time, we were braced for more notes, and she was very generous and complimentary and pleased with it, which was great. She was proud of the project, and we are told she would have loved it.”
On screen, the series belongs to Reynolds and Blethyn. Though the two actors never met on account of playing the same character in different time periods, they still spoke about the role and shared emails. They even swapped photos of a young Blethyn baring similarities to Reynolds, and of Reynolds’ grandmother resembling Blethyn.
But while all of Blethyn’s scenes were shot in around three weeks, Reynolds was filming for “months and months,” as she portrays a whole life, from Emma losing her mother and managing grief to falling in love and giving birth.
“Jess is doing loads and loads of different things. Brenda’s doing something quite specific and quite concentrated, but as soon as we knew that Brenda was up for doing it, it helped with the writing of it, to have her voice in my head, because she’s so funny and she’s so good at comedy,” Jakeways says. “She just understood it and really connected with it early on. Her mum was a scullery maid in a kitchen in a big house, so she was very connected to the material and very keen to tell the story of it.”
Shooting took place in Yorkshire, with Jakeways, Willis and lead director John Hardwick keen to capture the county’s beautiful and wild landscapes that “dance off the screen.” The production also transformed Broughton Hall, near Skipton, into Fairley Hall – the same location that was used in the original miniseries – while 1970s New York was recreated in Liverpool. Beamish Museum, an open-air, living museum near Durham that boasts replica streets and shopfronts from the 1820s to the 1950s, was the setting for the shop Emma opens after leaving Fairley Hall.
“This isn’t a big streamer show, and we absolutely went into it with the ambition of not letting the audience be aware of that, and to give it the cinematic scale that a terrestrial show deserves,” Willis says. “We tried to be as canny as we could with the natural landscape and getting all of that gorgeous, epic scenery, which is priceless, on screen as much as possible.”
The exec describes the decision to film in Liverpool at all as a “risk,” as it meant decamping from the show’s Leeds base and housing cast and crew on Merseyside for two days. “It was a big choice to make financially, but we really wanted to start the show with a bang and to show we weren’t just saying this was the richest woman in the world. We were showing the world she was living in.”
She also praises the performances of Will Mellor, Sophie Bould and Lenny Rush, as Emma’s father Jack, mother Elizabeth and brother Frank, respectively. “When they’re goofing around with Emma, I love them so much as a family, and all of them worked so hard,” she says. “They were so passionate about the show and they were just such professionals. It was an honour and a joy to work with such professional people who turned up for work and were pleased to be there.”
The trio are involved in a particularly emotional scene in episode one, though the show also has enough humour to deserve its C4 tagline as a “revenge romp.” That comes from Jakeways, who says her aim is to put as much comedy into every scene as she can.
“There’s huge tragedy and big sweeping emotions and scenes where it wouldn’t be quite so appropriate to have little jokes in there,” she says. “But I do almost always try to find places for humour. The only way you can really buy into characters and buy into relationships is through humour.”
For the writer, Emma is “the woman we all wish we were,” as she sets out to make a life for herself with nothing but “a brilliant brain and her ambition.”
“The thing we really want people to know about the show is it’s brilliant fun. It’s epic. It’s sexy, it’s funny, and hopefully it’s got big emotions,” Jakeways says. “It’s operatic, it’s cinematic. It should be a pleasure to watch. We don’t want it to be homework TV.”
Willis adds: “It’s a world you want to be in, it’s characters you want to be with. It’s a fun, fast-paced, emotional, funny, sexy melodrama that you just want to watch on an evening after work on your sofa and just deliciously sink into it.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
The Darling Buds of May: In 1950s Kent, earthy matriarch Ma Larkin presides over a chaotic clan whose booming farm and back-door business deals put them on a collision course with the taxman and the local gentry.
The House of Eliott: Two penniless sisters in 1920s London defy convention by launching a haute-couture fashion house, battling predatory men and class prejudice as they stitch together their own empire.
Revenge: A mysterious young woman infiltrates the Hamptons elite to methodically destroy the powerful family who framed her father, turning high-society galas into theatre for cold-blooded payback.
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tagged in: A Woman of Substance, Banijay Rights, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Beth Willis, Channel 4, Katherine Jakeways, The Forge