Renée Zellweger has played Bridget Jones in four films now (Image: Getty)
“Is she, like, a real person?”
I remember the first time I ‘heard of’ Bridget Jones.
One of my colleagues would bring in a copy of The Independent into work. Once a week she would turn to me – our chairs were back to back – and we would pore over the Bridget Jones’ diary column together. Another female colleague would join us and we would speculate on her real identity, as we knew – from colleagues at the paper – that she was a pseudonym.
“No – she’s a writer,” my colleague replied. “I don’t think she’s a journalist. And it looks like her story is based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.” Cue some disappointed sighs; as to be a columnist – we were jobbing reporters then – seemed like the thing to be.
We did not know Bridget Jones was the creation of author Helen Fielding then- but the column was a must-read and a guilty pleasure; it was accompanied by a picture of a woman smoking a cigarette.
It was in silhouette, with smoke curling away from her.
I think it may have even looked cool at the time – and no I didn’t smoke!
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renée Zellweger and Leo Woodall at a New York screening (Image: Getty)
A few months later the actual book came out. I hadn’t read it then but then I didn’t need to.
“Oh yeah you remind me of Bridget Jones” or “Oh that’s something Bridget Jones would do.”
Apparently I was living Bridget Jones’ life, so my friends told me. All because I was single.
Unlike Bridget I did not care about being single though and neither did my friends.
It was the 1990s. We had plenty of male friends (none of whom were we romantically or physically involved with) and life was hard work but fun.
Who would want to get married? Or who wanted to tie yourself down with one job or even (gulp) having to buy a house and live in the same home.
Bridget even seemed a bit boring, with her mortgage and her weird fascination with Christmas jumpers.
But she did get one thing right.
The cast of Bridget Jones attend a screening in New York (Image: Getty)
See the one thing Bridget was good at was being herself; as Mark Darcy pointed out, she was alright “just as you are.”
We’d seen our mothers grow up having to power dress and act like men and it felt exhausted.
The power dressing of the 1980s was out and like Bridget we were rocking wearing fluffy angora cardigans into work (a trend which carried on into the noughties) to offset our knee high boots from looking too…well you know.
Growing up in the 1980s had been about money and materialism and Bridget gave us a role model that wasn’t all that. She wasn’t mean, she didn’t act tough, plus she didn’t have act like a bloke to have bloke friends and/or get promoted at work, and she had good friends.
Bridget got by fine by being herself, she got her men by being herself. She didn’t have to chase Daniel Cleaver – even though she fancied him. She didn’t have to swipe on Tinder, she didn’t have to paint her eyebrows or have botox or stick strange stuff in her lips.
Bridget Jones was of her time, but for all her obsessive notetaking she didn’t pander to anyone. She moaned about eating too many calories but enjoyed her food anyway.
She knew Daniel Cleaver was a complete p***k but she went along for the ride (literally and metaphorically).
I did gobble up the second book when it came out, and I took on board that people like Bridget – ones that are themselves – are the people I wanted to be around, and the person I want to be.
Bridget got the stuff she needed, different to the things she wanted. Because she was ‘her’.
She is also symbolic of the carefree, careless way of the 1990s, when we didn’t have to live our lives out in public. Before social media meant suddenly we were forced to curate ourselves.
Bridget Jones wasn’t self conscious.
But she would have got roasted if she had put her antics up on Facebook though.
It’s really very hard to be ‘you’ truly you on any form of social media.
In some ways I’ve tried to keep that bit Bridget with me. But if you do not play into today’s social politics, as she didn’t, you are setting yourself on the road less travelled.
Now we need filters for everything, to negotiate the corporate ladder, to deal with extended family, parents at the school gates etc etc. My lovely wide social circle has contracted, mainly because people are just so ‘cautious now’, and you can’t just hang out with anyone anymore.
It’s exhausting!
So I shall be sitting with a bucket of salted and sweet popcorn, a glass of chardonnay and a bunch of my best friends (all my girls because once you get old you are allowed to have your own male friends now) to watch the new and last BJ film.
I will probably shed a tear for her and the era that she – like it or loathe it – lived and breathed in. It was fun, it was real and i
