I'm so glad I had Bridget as my Noughties role model

As the latest Bridget Jones movie breaks romcom records, Helen Coffey celebrates the continuing success of a female lead who knows how to cut loose and laugh at herself

- Helen Coffey

“Bridget Jones would risk ‘death by chardonnay’ in real life”, read one somewhat hysterical headline upon the release of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth film in the popular franchise based on Helen Fielding’s series of books.

This latest instalment, which sees Renée Zellweger return once more as everyone’s favourite frazzled yet loveable lead, proved that the eponymous heroine has something quite the opposite of what that po-faced headline might suggest: longevity. It’s now been almost 25 years since she first hit our screens in 2001, and the new film has recorded the highest-ever opening for a romcom in the UK. Bridget fever is clearly doing anything but diminishing as the decades roll by.

I can, technically, understand the “death by chardonnay” concerns after Dan Baumgardt, a senior lecturer in physiology, pharmacology and neuroscience at the University of Bristol, totted up Jones’s annual intake. The first book in the Fieldingpenned quartet states that Jones ingested 3,836 units of alcohol, smoked 5,277 cigarettes and consumed 11 million calories in one year, equating to an alarming 74 units of alcohol a week (more than five times the recommended maximum), a 15-a-day ciggie habit, and more than 30,000 calories per day – “six to 10 times more than most competing bodybuilders”, as Baumgardt pointed out in an article published by The Conversation. Which, given Jones’s perfectly healthy BMI, seems nigh-on impossible. (I guess we can just chalk that one up to creative licence.)

"There’s real freedom in watching a woman who never loses the ability to see the funny side, who never lets shame or fear hold her back, who refuses to say sorry for the crime of simply being human"

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