There will be blood | 3 December 2015

It was a stroke of genius to invite Glenda Jackson to make her return to acting as the star of Radio 4’s massive new series of dramas, Blood, Sex and Money, based on the novels of Émile Zola. Jackson plays Dide, the matriarch of the Rougon-Macquart families from Plassans in the depths of southern France. And she’s absolutely brilliant. Her voice is so distinctive, yet at the same time utterly ordinary, so it doesn’t stick out demanding attention but rather draws you in, like a spider weaving its web. Her timing, too, is pitch-perfect, each word given just the right weight for its meaning to be clear, whether making sinister predictions or laughing over another child’s comeuppance.

Dide participates as her own character, the mother and grandmother (sometimes great-grandmother) of this unruly brood of cheats, drunkards, idealists and social climbers. But she’s also the narrator of what is an incredibly complex storyline, not helped by the fact that each drama focuses on a different member of the family, often living in a different timeframe.