A Woman Of Substance

“A Woman of Substance is clearly Channel 4’s bid to rival Rivals, the hugely successful Disney+ adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper’s blockbuster. But it is fatally undermined in the attempt by the lack of humour available. Barbara Taylor Bradford’s tale is a glorious one but it is not a witty or lighthearted one. Only Cooper managed that, which is what makes Rivals sing. A Woman of Substance still works brilliantly as a nostalgia piece – a perfect homage to the age of excess and television that drowned you in plot and let someone else worry about the rest. Think of it as Dallas in Yorkshire. Three-star television but four-star nonsense and delight.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“This drama can be a bit “tell” not “show”. It is also, obviously, really silly. But it does have the nous to lean into the absurdity with thunderous string music, fortissimo piano and sweeping shots of the lovely Yorkshire landscape. If anything, the parallel timeline is even more lush. Liverpool stands in for 1970s New York (quite an achievement by the production designer Alice Normington). Here the older Emma, played by Vera star Brenda Blethyn, bustles about the place in silk scarves and shades, being handed important pieces of paper by staff who appear to have wandered in from the set of Boogie Nights.”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“Melodrama, sex, opulence and romance… Barbara Taylor Bradford’s epic bonkbuster A Woman Of Substance is such an outrageously guilty pleasure, it could probably give you high cholesterol. If Jilly Cooper had been one of the Bronte sisters, this is what you’d get - a country house on the Yorkshire moors, where a wicked mill owner lives with his mad, drunken wife, and an ambitious maid romps with the master’s son as she plots her rise to riches.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Despite the longueurs, AWOS gets where it needs to go. In the book, our vengeance-seeking heroine orders Fairley Hall to be razed to the ground, and by the end, has the elite at her feet. In the new version, Emma is just as angry, but leaves the pillars of the establishment unshaken, and ultimately faces an uncertain future. How apt. Social mobility, in the UK, has been in decline since the Eighties. Kudos to the creators of this mostly thrilling series, for forcing BTB’s most beloved character to move with the times.”
Charlotte O’Sullivan, The Independent

“One of the funniest facts about Channel 4 is that, for all its desire to be subversive and daring, its highest-rated show of all time is the 1985 period drama A Woman of Substance. Forty years on, they’ve remade it. And instead of doing it with postmodern irony they’ve turned out a loving homage to Barbara Taylor Bradford and her rags-to-riches tale, albeit with a raging libido. Even when it’s terrible, which is at regular intervals, it’s irresistible.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph