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.
Bridget Jones is one of those rarities: a break-out success, which remained part of the cultural and political landscape over an extended period. Fielding’s chaotic diarist became a benchmark for the ups and downs of feminist advances. She was cited by former Tory minister David Willetts in 2008 as representative of a generation of university-educated women who had upended the nuclear family by crowding out their husbands in the workplace. The resulting furore brought her full circle from the subject, to the object, of many column inches.
Mad About the Boy, the 2013 novel on which the film will be based, revisited her at 51, still obsessively logging her weight and her alcohol units, but chewing Nicorette gum in place of Silk Cut cigarettes. While gum might have been replaced by vapes, and Twitter by X or Instagram in the life of the on-trend ex-smoker, there is a shiver of topicality in her updated biography that will not be lost on the film-makers. She is now the single mother of two young boys, struggling to get back on the dating scene after losing her husband – the saintly Mark Darcy, played by Colin Firth in the films – to a landmine during negotiations for the release of aid workers in Sudan.
There is a particular genius to any work of art that manages to remain topical across decades. In Bridget Jones’s case, it is the result of minutely observed comic tics that remain excruciatingly familiar, even if the props do not. In the case of another great cultural survivor, Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley – currently making a triumphant comeback in an eight-part TV miniseries – it is for precisely the opposite reasons.
This is the sixth screen outing of the psychopathic sponger, who was introduced to the world by Highsmith in 1955 in the first of five novels. Ripley’s superpower is a lack of specificity which allows each era to project its own concerns on him. The earliest adaptation, directed by René Clément, starred a creepily beautiful Alain Delon as an amoral existentialist. In Anthony Minghella’s 2000 take, Matt Damon was a talented outsider hooked on glamour and privilege. In the latest version, Andrew Scott is a paranoid older everyman with a no-holds-barred ruthlessness born of the knowledge that life has passed him by.
But however different they may be in their aims and effects, Bridget Jones and Tom Ripley have two things in common: they both originate in writing designed for mass readerships. And both still have the common touch.
