The return of Bridget Jones  

Viv Groskop | iNews – September 7, 2016

Years: 20, books: 3, films: 3, ability to keep coming back: endless (v.g).

So Bridget’s back. Again. Bridget keeps coming back, doesn’t she? Frankly, Bridget can come back as many times as she wants. Or so it seems. This is the third film, with the fourth book (Bridget Jones’s Baby: The Diaries, a collection of the columns upon which this film is based) out next month. Two decades is not a bad shelf life for a woman who made her name for being young, single and anxious about feeling irrelevant and unwanted.

Part of me struggles with accepting the cockroach qualities of the Bridget Jones brand, much as I loved the original diary entries just as if they had been written specifically about me and my friends. Because something about Bridget’s survival makes no sense at all. How can it be that more than 20 years after she first appeared in a newspaper column, the character still has enough sway for a $35m movie? It’s pretty extraordinary. And perhaps unprecedented in publishing.

The success of Bridget Jones even edges close to the Harry Potter league. And that is not a fair comparison. JK Rowling’s characters – although the audience grew up with them – were never designed to represent a particular archetype that captured a particular moment. Helen Fielding not only managed to capture the zeitgeist, but to hold on to it: an extremely unusual feat that few authors have managed.

For many women of a certain age, though, Bridget never quite goes away, because she represents a point of comparison. We age with her, unfortunately. And yet she always seems to be picking up new fans too. Just as Adrian Mole finds new spotty teenagers with every generation, Bridget has a universality that doesn’t lose its appeal.

Yes, Bridget risks irrelevance in the age of Tinder and Snapchat. But she’s an accurate portrait of a very British type of woman who is still going out and getting rat-arsed and pontificating pseudo-knowledgeably about important international news stories about which she realistically knows sod all. This woman is still out there, talking about Syria after seven vodka and Red Bulls.

Embarrassingly, I have been this woman many times myself, complete with the calorie-counting and the blackouts and the turkey curry on Boxing Day. Who hasn’t? That’s the whole point.

It’s 21 years since the first Bridget Jones Diary column appeared in The Independent in February 1995. Long before anyone pictured her as Renée Zellweger, Bridget was a blacked-out photofit in profile: messy-haired, snub-nosed, fag in hand, tendril falling on her face, an image which featured on the original book which came out the following year.

The column lampooned the preoccupations of the Cosmo generation raised on desperate articles about “How to Get Your Man.” Bridget wanted to lose weight, cut down on scratchcard use and stick to a maximum fourteen units of alcohol a week (as if).

At the height of Bridget-mania, I was an intern on (yes) Cosmopolitan magazine, living in a house with three (male) university friends who once found me passed out on the doormat, key in hand, having almost made it home. It was because of these flatmates that the phenomenon that catapulted Bridget Jones into the mainstream (and, arguably, sealed the book deal) passed me by. In the autumn of 1995, you couldn’t move for mentions of Mr Darcy, as Colin Firth and his 19th-century wet T-shirt rode high on the success of BBC1’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Suddenly the comparison was obvious. Bridget was Lizzie. And if you weren’t a bit Bridget yourself, you knew women who were. Everyone identified with the Austen-lite concepts, cleverly updated: the diary form standing in for letters, the tales of pointless and disastrous dinner parties, the exhaustion of dealing with “smug marrieds”. Fielding’s creation was both original enough to be exciting and familiar enough to appeal to a wide audience.

I don’t identify so much any more, not least because Bridget “jumped the shark” so many times in her various incarnations that I couldn’t keep up with her. And in any case, there’s a bit of sleight of hand with this, the third film, Bridget Jones’s Baby, based on a brief period when Helen Fielding reprised the original Independent column in 2005.

The timeframe and plot of this film are not to be confused with the latest fictional outing, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which came out in 2014. This long-awaited Bridget update saw her wrestling with headlice, a toy boy and Minecraft. The book had mixed reviews, with many readers unhappy about Bridget, now a widowed mother-of-two but still boy-mad at the age of 51.

In the latest movie outing, though, we rewind: Bridget is in her early forties, single and as daffy and desperate as ever. The plot is driven by wanton disregard for use-by dates on condom packets (v. v. bad) and two unexpected one-night stands. I won’t say more for fear of spoilers but you can guess the rest from the trailer alone. The set piece “hospital revolving door” bit is already being hailed as a comedy classic by even the most harsh film critics and the early reviews are reassuringly warm.

In some ways this is a clever cheat for what has become the Bridget Jones franchise. The audience don’t have to be faced with the uncomfortable reality of Bridget settled down. Renée Zellweger is still plausible and believable as Bridget (despite recent controversies over whether her face has been allowed to age naturally).

And we get another dose of Darcy (Colin Firth) with a calorific side order of Patrick Dempsey, acting as a sort of Hugh Grant upgrade.

Is this Bridget’s last hurrah? Possibly. The 2014 book was rejected as a model for the script for this movie, which went through many incarnations (and cast changes, including Hugh Grant pulling out of the project a couple of years ago).

But if there’s one thing about Bridget, it’s that no matter how down and out she seems, she always somehow bounces back. Zellweger doesn’t turn 51 for another four years. I quite fancy seeing her with a bad case of nits.