In tone and style they might be very different, but neither has lost their common touch
When Helen Fielding began writing as the fictional diarist Bridget Jones in the Independent three decades ago, she thought it would never last more than a “few weeks”. Working alongside “very clever, seasoned journalists who were writing about New Labour and Chechnya”, she said she “felt stupid writing about calories and alcohol units and why it takes three hours between waking up and leaving the house in the morning. Then we started getting letters praising the column, I started boasting, ‘It’s by me, meeeee!’ and things snowballed from there.”
They certainly did. Four books, three films and a musical followed. It is a truth universally acknowledged that generation X and millennials love Bridget Jones, and they will love this week’s announcement of a fourth film in the franchise that has grown up around the character, with two of its original leads, Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant.
