Blood, Sex and Money - Emile Zola

Written by Emile Zola
Read by Full Cast
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Dramatization

Blood, Sex and Money
A BBC Radio 4 Serialisation of Zola’s Epic Saga
By: Emile Zola
Narrated by: Paul McGann, Alison Steadman, Samuel West, Anna Maxwell Martin, David Schofield, full cast, Emma Rigby, Angela Griffin, Robert Lindsay, Glenda Jackson, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Holliday Grainger, Fenella Woolgar, Georgina Campbell
Length: 23 hrs and 18 mins
Radio/TV Program
Release date: 22-08-2019
Language: English
Publisher: BBC Digital Audio

Publisher’s Summary
Glenda Jackson stars in this award-winning BBC Radio series, inspired by literature’s greatest ever whistleblower, Émile Zola, and his epic saga of the Rougon-Macquart family.

First published between 1870 and 1893, Émile Zola’s 20-book cycle chronicling four generations of the Rougon-Macquarts, was a shocking exposé of the decadence, degradation, and moral decay of 19th-century France. It included some of his greatest novels, among them his masterpiece, Germinal.

These innovative, ambitious dramas, first broadcast on Radio 4 over 24 hours in 2015-16, is a radical reimagining of Zola’s classic series, introducing us to 104-year-old matriarch, Dide, imprisoned in an asylum in southern France. Trapped, but omniscient, she broods over her ‘family of wolves’. As a young woman, she gave birth to two dynasties that exemplified French society. One legitimate – rich, powerful, obsessive and corrupt. The other illegitimate – poor, vulnerable, weak and depraved.

In these three seasons, themed around blood, sex and money, we come to know the members of her extended family intimately – the good, the bad and the misguided. As we follow their highs and lows, we are taken deep into the heart of France’s ‘Second Empire’, and drawn into the tragic, farcical reign of Napoleon III, as it marches forward towards a modern, industrialised society.

This groundbreaking series won Best Drama at the BBC Radio and Music Awards 2016, and Best Adaptation at the BBC Audio Drama Awards 2017, and boasts a star cast including Robert Lindsay, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Holliday Grainger, Samuel West, Anna Maxwell Martin, Paul McGann, Georgina Campbell, Jack Lowden and Alison Steadman.

Also included is a 30-minute bonus programme, The Life and Work of Émile Zola, in which Glenda Jackson travels to Paris to discover how Zola’s experience and the physical and cultural landscape in which he lived influenced his great novels.

Written by Émile Zola

Dramatised by Dan Rebellato, Oliver Emanuel, Martin Jameson and Lavinia Murray

Produced and directed by Pauline Harris, Polly Thomas, Kirsty Williams, Nadia Molinari and Gary Brown

Executive Producer: Melanie Harris

Series Producer: Susan Roberts

Sound designer: Eloise Whitmore

©2019 BBC Worldwide Ltd (P)2019 BBC Worldwide Ltd