Being Bridget Jones (2020) Movie Script
1
The best shot in the whole show!
New Year's resolutions.
I will not...
..bitch about anyone
behind their backs,
but be positive about everyone.
..get upset over men,
but instead be poised and cool
like an ice-queen.
..sulk about having no boyfriend,
but develop inner poise
and authority,
complete without boyfriend,
as best way to obtain boyfriend.
..fall for any of the following -
alcoholics, workaholics,
commitment phobics,
misogynists,
megalomaniacs, chauvinists,
emotional fuckwits or freeloaders,
perverts.
25 years ago, Helen Fielding
introduced us to a new character.
For this documentary, I went
into the attic.
I was quite pleased when I found
this, because that's the proof
of Bridget Jones with some
coffee on it.
It's funny looking at it, because,
of course, I had no idea
that this was going to be a book
that changed my life so much.
No idea.
Now, for the very first time,
Helen's going to help us
understand Bridget
a little better...
The truth is, I was really, really
nervous about this filming,
because I was going to lose a stone.
But of course, the lockdown
came in the middle of it,
and so now I'm hiding
underneath the table.
..by telling her own story.
This is really the original
Bridget Jones' diary.
This was my diary.
We'll be meeting friends and family
who inspired many of the characters.
I think I'm too dull to appear
in the books.
And the fans Bridget inspired.
Bridget Jones's Diary is
definitely the first place
that I understood that women
didn't have to be perfect.
Oh, and go on, then,
some film stars too.
I just thought, join in the fun.
I mean, get in on the joke.
I should have done this years ago.
Done what?
This! Ooh!
Hello, Mummy.
That was definitely me.
The male producers didn't
really understand
why big pants would be funny.
Who knew?
You know, they really
didn't get big pants.
People loved the big pants joke.
Who knew?
Everyone knows diaries are just
full of crap.
I make friends every day because
of Bridget Jones.
Someone comes up and says,
"I learned this from Bridget,"
or, "She means so much
to me because..."
You know? What a gift.
This is the story of how an anxious,
calorie-obsessed,
usually pissed singleton in her
30s changed the world.
You think you're making
an interesting documentary,
but all anyone at home
is thinking is,
"Fuck me, look how old
they are now.
"Look at the state of Hugh!"
Christmas 1969.
One day, many years ago,
Fanny Cradock and Mrs Beaton
decided to bake
some currant biscuits.
My dad used to make films
when we were little -
it was his hobby - on Super 8.
I look at this one-year-old...
..Fielding, and I think...
..that was just like a little
miniature Bridget Jones.
Now take an egg...
This is my favourite bit.
Just like...
Oh, well... Take another egg.
So hopeless,
so confused by the world.
TRAY CLATTERS
I think this is was the first
Bridget Jones moment, frankly -
not learning by mistakes,
ever optimistic.
I think the thing about
Bridget Jones' moments
is the perfection of imperfection.
It's the fact that the things
that go wrong are much more fun
than just having perfect biscuits,
which, frankly, you could
go buy in a shop.
A Bridget moment -
it's sort of like -
what was that famous quote
about irony? -
it's hard to describe,
but I'll know it when I see it.
I think in Bridget Jones's Baby,
the mud is one of my favourites.
"I may be old and inappropriately
dressed, but at least
"I look fucking amazing."
Woo!
I also loved when she has to go
to a very formal affair
and she can't get up the stairs
because the dress is too tight
round the ankles.
Been there!
It's thinking you've just nailed
it in terms of your wardrobe,
and you go out there with all
the confidence in the world,
and it's the toilet paper stuck
to your shoe, or something.
Hello. Bridget, I think you should
go to the ladies.
But I went before I left home.
Trust me on this one.
SHE GASPS
The comedy of awkwardness,
which I'm sure is global,
but I think it is, to me,
very, very identifiably British.
Maybe this was
the mysterious Mr Right
I'd been waiting my whole
life to meet...
You remember Bridget?
Maybe not.
I think there are people from other
cultures who don't really enjoy
cringing quite as much as we do.
Smile at the sun and the sun
will always smile
If you smile at the sun...
To understand the beginnings
of Bridget,
you have to look to Helen's
hometown of Morley in Yorkshire,
where the northern sense of humour
was instilled from a young age.
I want to make it clear that
I'm not actually working class.
Much as I'd like to seem
more interesting by saying that,
I'm really not,
I'm middle class,
however, I did grow up around
the closeness of people
and the talking over
the washing line.
When I look at a fence like this,
I always think of Les Dawson.
He was always talking over the
fence to his friends
and they always had these corsets on
he was lifting up and...
SHE MOUTHS
I had to change me seat three
times in the pictures,
because of men. No!
Were you interfered with?
Eventually.
And I think a lot of the roots
of the jokes in Bridget
are probably because I grew up with
Morecambe and Wise,
who came from Morley. Or Ernie did.
We used to watch Morecambe and Wise
every Saturday night.
It was all the thing
like Shirley Bassey
walking down the staircase,
being all fancy...
..I gave you love
To think it could die...
..then her foot goes through
the staircase.
That was the atmosphere - that you
don't get fancy, you don't get
above yourself and you make fun.
We were off again, our first
holiday in the new Dormobile.
I suppose Bridget's dad is quite
like my dad, in a way.
Very gentle and supportive.
He was also terribly funny.
And now, ladies and gentlemen,
we present Helen
in her death-defying dive.
He was a really good man -
as Bridget's dad is and Jim
Broadbent is - through and through.
Hello, Dad. Hello, darling.
How's it going? Torture!
Your mother's trying to fix
you up with some divorcee. Oh.
I think Bridget's mum
is quite interesting.
Bridget's mum was always
trying to change her.
Now, what are you going to put on?
This. Oh, don't be silly, Bridget.
Now run upstairs, laid out something
lovely on your bed.
Change, be different -
which is not the case
at all with my own mum.
Helen dedicated the first Bridget
Jones book to her mum Nellie...
..for not being like Bridget's.
Nellie still lives
in Yorkshire today.
If you were describing Bridget Jones
to someone who doesn't know her,
what would you say?
I'd say she was like you.
Thank you very much.
She likes life.
She likes chocolate.
She likes having fun.
And do you think it's true that
laughter can help you
through difficult times?
Definitely true.
With the help of some chocolate.
There's some aspects of Bridget's
mum which I took from my mum.
One of them is her obsession
with food.
Another one of Mother's
culinary triumphs -
everything in miniature.
Mini treacle tart, Admiral Darcy?
Erm, no. No, thank you.
The mini spotted dick rather
finished me off.
THEY CHUCKLE
My mum was a domestic
science teacher,
and she'd grown up with rationing.
So when there wasn't rationing any
more, she was just in paradise.
You used to cook, didn't you?
Everything. We used to see people
eating in very posh restaurants
and then go home and have
the same things.
They were good years.
Very good years.
What would you say were the most
important things in life?
Don't say chocolate.
Love.
Because love covers everything.
Every argument, seriously or not,
can be sorted out with love.
Helen's first attempts as a writer
came in her teenage years...
..with romantic poetry.
I took myself quite seriously,
so this is, like -
I'm lying in the bath
feeling melancholy
Just wallowing in self-pity
And warm and wet and happy
and soft and sad
Though something, somewhere
In my head
Keeps saying,
You really loved him, didn't you?
And another bit
Oh, come on, pull yourself together
now, Fielding.
Oh, God.
It must be love
Love, love...
Helen thrived in school,
and life changed for ever when this
grammar school girl
swapped Yorkshire for
Oxford University.
I was quite intimidated by Oxford.
I didn't really like it
to start with.
I wasn't confident at all.
I felt a bit out of my depth.
And if I could go back and give
advice to...
..to myself then, I would've said,
"Just don't worry.
If you had been to public school
or you were from the south
or anything like that, just enjoy
it. You were there for a reason."
This was the moment I think it
sort of turned around for me.
I got a part playing
Marlene Dietrich,
and this bloke came up to me
and said,
"Oh, I say, that was jolly good.
I'd like to be your boyfriend."
And I was like, "Oh, God,
these public school boys.
That's the sort of thing
that really annoys me."
Anyway, it was Richard Curtis.
The first time I saw Helen, she was
acting very badly in a play.
We went out with each other
for a while,
but I wasn't good-looking enough,
really, for her.
Richard was living in a house
with lots of other guys,
including Rowan Atkinson.
They always say that they thought
I was really sophisticated
till I opened my mouth and this
Yorkshire accent came out.
She was absolutely remarkable
and magical.
She was so northern,
so friendly,
wasn't conscientious, didn't appear
to have read any books,
liked pop music.
She was so not stuck-up.
My nightmare is a friend
to whom you say, you know,
"How have you been?"
And they say, "Fine."
Whereas if you say,
"How have you been?" to Helen,
you're there for an hour-and-a-half.
And it's all going to be sort of
funny or interesting or quirky
or insulting or panicky, you know?
She just makes life,
and particularly her life,
an exceptionally interesting story.
So this... this is really
the original Bridget Jones' diary.
This was my diary from university.
And when I looked back,
I was horrified to see that there
were very few social engagements,
but an awful lot of lists like this.
Alpen - 300 calories.
Leeks - 20 calories.
Rhubarb and sugar - 50 calories.
Custard - 150 calories.
Steak - 100 calories.
That's not right!
Banana - 100 calories.
Custard again - 200 calories.
Weetabix, soup, Wall's Viennetta.
SHE CHUCKLES
Look, here we've got my weight -
8st 7lb!
Why was I counting my calories
when I weighed 8st 7lb?
Somehow, even by then,
it had all got to me
and I was trying to be different.
Thinner. Better.
Sunday 15th January.
9st. Excellent.
Alcohol units - three.
Cigarettes - four.
Calories - 3,879. Repulsive!
Negative thoughts - 942.
Minutes spent counting
negative thoughts -
127, approximately.
Being a woman is worse
than being a farmer.
There's so much harvesting and
crop spraying to be done. Legs...
..to be waxed, underarms shaved,
eyebrows...
..plucked, feet pumiced, skin
exfoliated, moisturised, spots...
..cleansed, roots dyed,
eyelashes tinted, nails...
..filed, cellulite massaged,
stomach muscles exercised.
Sometimes I wonder what I would be
like if left to revert to nature.
With a full beard and handlebar
moustache on each shin.
Is it any wonder
girls have no confidence?
I think that there are certain
themes that Helen is exploring
very sneakily, um... with her humour,
that are universal.
No-one is born with Zen-like
perspective,
where you can look at something
and see that it's futile,
or see that it has no value.
And we sidestep it completely
into self-acceptance
in this wonderful, fabulous life,
where we're not expending energy
on ridiculous things,
like how much we weigh,
or what we look like in a dress,
or our hair, or whether or not
we've achieved this list of things
that other people value by the time
we're 30 or 40 or 50.
She struggles with it and she tries
and she fails, like all of us.
BRIDGET PUFFS AND GROANS
It's a sort of celebration
of failure, of being a bit shit.
You know she aspires to change
her life, make it better.
"Will lose 10lb,
will stop smoking."
And then it's the fun,
the celebration of never achieving
any of that
and just having to go and get
pissed on Chardonnay,
and I think that's quite
an interesting contrast
between that and Instagram culture.
All these women saying
to each other,
"Blessed! Having a wonderful time!
"Everything's perfect!
Kids - perfect!"
You know, for someone to debunk
all that,
or to pull the rug from under
all that and say,
"Well, it's all a bit shit
"and we are competing,
but, you know, we never make it,
"and let's just have another, let's
get pissed again and have a fag,"
is bliss.
Bridget's neuroses were devoured
by a generation of young female fans
in the '90s.
One of them was MP Jess Phillips.
I wish there was some silver bullet,
but I also wish I was a size 10.
Ah...
And another was
Candice Carty-Williams,
whose best-selling novel Queenie
was partly inspired
by her love of the Bridget books.
I absolutely loved it.
And it seems funny to me now,
as if, like, I could see
my future self!
Cos I was a 16-year-old kid.
I had read the first two when I was
definitely too young.
I think they helped me get through
a lot of...
You know, I was someone who also,
like, made a lot of mistakes,
and I wasn't very together.
As a black woman, I was also like,
"OK, I should be strong,"
but then I felt this affinity
to this, like, white woman
who was also getting into
messy situations.
Black women are not represented
in film, TV, books.
Like, where do you find yourself?
I never found myself.
So I kept going back to Bridget
as this person
who could also mess up.
Alcohol units - three.
Calories - 759.
Entirely ice cream.
Up until that point,
there were very few books
about what it was like to be
a young woman.
To, like, be annoyed
with your period coming,
or having dirty hair
and never being able to get it
to style the right way.
And it sounds so flippant
when I say that,
that, like, you'd always have
a stupid kink in your hair
that, literally, is like
a universal issue,
but no-one has ever written it down
in a book before.
There definitely was a massive
amount of pressure then
to be very, very thin.
You were waif-like and perfect.
And then there's this book
that actually talks about
your real-life experiences
as if they are valid.
It was just about us.
And that... that matters.
Bridget Jones's Diary was
definitely the first place
that I understood that women
didn't have to be perfect.
And that was really important.
I think that now, more than ever,
we are able to talk about that.
And I think that... Of course, like,
Helen's legacy is, like, huge.
Another element that resonated
with readers
was Bridget's struggle
as a woman in the workplace,
and many of her escapades
were directly inspired by
Helen's own early career.
It was carrot craziness.
It was a national carrot obsession.
It's like being an important
scientist in a chemistry laboratory,
doing an experiment.
When I left college,
I was seduced by the glamour
of the BBC!
The news editor in Bristol
thought he saw some promise in me,
so he took me to work
in the regional newsroom.
I think that Helly was part
of a generation that felt confident
when they burst out of university.
And then they did find the clash
with reality was quite,
you know, harsh when I don't know
that there were any women
in the upper echelons of the BBC,
but it was definitely a thought
that maybe this generation
would be the one to break through.
You'd give them a story
in the morning and they'd say,
"Yes! Let's go with it!"
So then I'd go zooming off
to shoot something.
The most traumatic one was
the 90-year-old parachute jumper,
went up in the airplane and they
were saying, "Jump, Archie, jump!"
I can't see anywhere soft to land!
How about on your arse?
And they said, "Look,
there's a nice soft field. Jump!"
And he jumps and it wasn't a field,
it was a sewage works.
BRIDGET YELLS
And then I was left sort of
cleaning up the mess
and he'd gone over his head
in the sewage and...
Bridget? You're on.
This is Bridget Jones
for Sit Up Britain,
reporting to you
from a big vat of excrement.
And I did a little bit
of presenting,
but not very successfully.
The butterflies give the show
a special conservation theme.
Helen Fielding reports.
Oh, yeah, this was when I moved
to John Craven's Newsround.
..set up the spectacular displays.
You'd hardly think of butterflies
as a home accessory,
but nobody's expecting
anyone to buy them.
They're here because this is
butterfly year,
aimed at preserving...
When the presenting really got bad,
it was when it was live,
and the worst one was the birth
of the royal baby.
They're running up to record now.
Right. Shall I practise it?
All the camera crews were outside
the hospital.
Someone suddenly went,
"Helen, go! Go! Go! Go! Go!"
Well, it's all feverish excitement
here outside the hospital
and you can feel it rising
by the minute.
And I went, "Argh! The baby
hasn't been born yet,
"but it's all very exciting.
Now back to the studio."
SHE LAUGHS
I always had these ideas
of what I wanted to be,
but, almost invariably,
it turned out
that I wasn't quite... quite
capable of it.
It actually made me quite
self-conscious, being on screen.
And now back to the studio!
All the things that you would most
like
not to have in common with
Bridget...
..are the things that I find...
..I relate to, um, most closely.
Welcome to the launch of
Kafka's Motorbike,
the Greatest Book of our Time!
TRICKLE OF APPLAUSE
Obviously, except for your books,
Mr Rushdie.
I've had moments where I feel like
I'm sitting beside myself,
watching my Bridget alter ego
just spiralling,
circling the drain.
And, Lord Archer,
yours aren't bad either.
The words need to stop,
but just keep coming.
The wrong words,
they just keep coming.
Thank you for coming to the launch
of one of the Top 30 books
of our time,
anyway... at least...
There came a point when I decided
that the thing I really wanted to do
was be a writer, and that I should
really get on with it and try.
I wrote this Mills & Boon
called Fires Of Zanzibar,
and I thought that was an easy way
to start.
And then I got a letter back
from them rejecting the novel
and saying that neither
my characters nor my story were
up to the high standards demanded
by the Mills & Boon reader.
The last paragraph, the doctor was
pulling the nurse to him roughly,
and she looked up at him,
tremblingly,
and then he said,
"It's all right, it isn't a snake."
And I sort of saw their point.
There was quite a lot of rejection
in my attempts to be a writer.
It didn't come easy.
Helen switched tack from television
and started making progress
as a newspaper journalist,
writing some impressively
serious pieces.
At the same time, the sexism
of the '90s workplace
was sowing the seeds
of more Bridget comedy.
Happy New Year, Mr Fitzherbert.
Happy New Year, Brenda.
Mr Fitzherbert - Tits Pervert,
more like.
Daniel's boss who stares freely
at my breasts
with no idea who I am or what I do.
Then there was the added confusion
of how you deal with a charming boss
you secretly really fancy.
"Come on, Bridge," he said,
leaning towards me seductively.
"I need to have a serious
discussion about your blouse.
"It's extremely thin.
"Almost, when you examine it, thin
to the point of transparency.
"'I've got to meet someone, '
I whispered desperately."
That's Bridget.
"'Shame, ' he said softly.
'Well, I'll see you Monday, '
"and gave me a look so dirty, I felt
like throwing myself after him,
"shouting, 'Shag me! Shag me!'"
You see, that's very Helen.
Helen is, really,
apart from, you know,
talent and achievement and all that,
a dirty, dirty bitch.
It's what my mother's generation,
sort of '50s,
would've called
"not safe in taxis".
Er... you know, he's a predator.
Type casting.
You're looking very sexy, Jones.
I think I'm going to have to take
you out to dinner now,
whether you like it or not.
I always feel like I'm going to get
into trouble
from the conversations
that we'll have on the side bar
when we're filming.
I always feel like, "I shouldn't
have... I shouldn't have said that.
I shouldn't have..."
He's a lot of fun.
Hugh, it was not my suggestion,
but was an absolutely brilliant
suggestion,
and, in fact, a lot of the lines
were adlibs by Hugh.
"This is a very silly little dress,
Jones,
"and these are very silly
little boots."
And, um... these... are...
"These are... fuck me, absolutely
enormous pants." That was me.
Fuck! No, no, don't apologise,
I like them.
And then the bits that followed,
"Don't worry, I'm wearing
something quite similar myself..."
"Hello, Mummy!"
That was definitely me.
Sorry, I have to have another look.
They're too good to be true. No!
I remember when I watched it
and there's the
bum on the hand in the lift,
isn't there?
And she does that sort of like,
"Hm!"
Um... I remember being surprised
by that.
Because obviously, you're kind of
like, "Why are you touching her?
"She doesn't want to be touched."
Certainly, as I've got older,
I'm, like, that's harassment.
And, like, she's lucky... He's lucky
that she fancies him
because he could be in trouble.
She's essentially sexually harassed.
I don't blame Helen for writing it
like that,
because that is the way that...
..then...
..women were expected to experience
their working environment.
Nowadays, you'd be straight
before a tribunal.
Incidentally, at Sit Up Britain,
no-one ever gets sacked
for shagging the boss.
That's a matter of principle.
I went to see the first
Bridget movie
for the first time
in about 15 years,
and I was just completely startled
by the fact
that you really couldn't
make that movie now.
The number of shots
with the hand on the bum,
Mr Tits Pervert, Richard Finch,
"Let's get a shot of the tits."
Um...
And I think, "Thank you, Me Too".
The Me Too movement inspired Helen
to bring Bridget back in 2018
for a one-off diary entry.
"What did I put up with
in the days of these diaries?
I just accepted that part and parcel
of having a job was that my boss
would stare freely at my breasts,
not know my name
and ask me to put a tight dress on
to make an idiotic speech.
None of that could happen now.
Mr Fitzherbert and Richard Finch
would lose their jobs, no question."
Helen had sorted out her career.
But by the early 1990s,
she found herself in her 30s
and terminally single.
Luckily, her best mates
were in the same boat.
Tracey MacLeod was the presenter
of BBC's The Late Show.
Good evening. Good evening.
Good evening.
And Sharon Maguire
was one of its directors.
They later became the basis of
Bridget's mates, Shazzer and Jude.
You should have said, "I'm not
married because I'm a singleton,
"you smug, prematurely ageing,
narrow-minded morons,"
Shazzer ranted.
"There's a whole generation
of single girls like me
"with our own incomes and homes
"who have lots of fun and don't need
to wash anyone else's socks."
"Singletons!" I shouted happily.
"Hurrah for the singletons!"
I think we were all slightly aware
that the, um... gene pool
of available
potential boyfriends
and life partners
was diminishing quite quickly.
And we probably, for that reason,
made some quite bad
relationship decisions.
It was a bit like, you know,
the last 'copter out of Saigon.
We grabbed a few ropes that
we probably shouldn't have grabbed
and then we'd come together
and we'd tell each other about them.
But it was just a lot of fun.
I don't think any of us
were conforming to
what you were supposed to do
in your mid-30s -
ie, have a husband, have babies -
but I was questioning myself as to,
"Well, if I'm not going to go
and do that sort of thing,
"what is the meaning of life, then?"
And the answer, it turned out,
was to go out and get trashed a lot.
Tracey and Sharon and I
were a little gang.
I was doing restaurant reviews
and we used to turn them into
a minibreak
and we went to Burford,
we bought matching jelly shoes.
And then, during the restaurant
review, we were laughing so much
that Tracey was sick on the plate,
but we didn't realise.
It was one of those classic things
where she could've died, you know?
Someone had to do
the Heimlich manoeuvre.
Helen was also borrowing the best
stories of her two gay best friends,
Daniel Wood and Richard Coles,
to create the character Tom.
Tom is the gay male friend,
which Dan and I have both been
that person.
And so, we scan Helen's treatment
of that character
with particular interest.
THEY LAUGH
Slightly snatching away from it!
I think you'll find...!
I think you'll find...!
There was a bit where Tom had
a nose job.
And that was from the experience
of somebody else.
And when that happened, we all rather
distanced ourselves from Tom at that point.
You could see that...
But then you think about
the parts of Tom that are the warm,
witty and wise friend, that's me.
- I feel that's me. Yeah, yeah.
- THEY LAUGH
The other thing that's
weird is that so many bits
of the experience are replayed out
in the book and then in the film.
And the bit that I keep coming
back to
is the bit about the blue soup
and the string.
Because I remember things
going wrong with blue string.
Delicious. Really special.
It's really... it's really very good.
It really is very nice.
THEY LAUGH
One of the things I remember
with most admiration,
as well as affection, with Helen,
is the way Bridget was her...
was a battle for her.
She was kind of fighting a fight
that I recognised.
She was a woman in her 30s
standing on her own two feet,
trying to make a living.
Lots of her circle of friends
were kind of effortlessly
seeming to conquer the world.
And lots of the women were,
of course, married to alpha males.
And she deliberately chose
not to do that.
And she made her own way
in the world.
I think the fictional representation
of a single girl in her 30s
was way outdated,
and there was still the notion
of Miss Havisham hanging around,
and I guess I was just privately
trying to correct that.
You think of Bridget Jones
as this kind of good-time
'90s, you know,
feel-good phenomenon.
And actually, it does come from
a place of, um... dislocation,
anxiety, not quite knowing
where you fit in.
I think the reason why the books
and the films became so popular
was, um... because they're about
loneliness.
They're about the fear
of loneliness.
All by myself
Any more...
ANSWERMACHINE: You have no messages.
I remember an interesting thing
about making the film work.
The big moment was grabbing a scene
that was originally much later
in the film,
which is Bridget alone in her room,
singing,
and shoving it right at the front
of the film.
And that was the point at which
audiences, test audiences,
completely sympathised with her,
as well as laughing with her.
Don't wanna be all by myself
Any more...
Really, that is what it's about.
Maybe at its deepest level,
it's terror of being alone.
It's Bridget's terror of
dying alone, eaten by Alsatians.
Because we're all terrified of that,
and it's coming.
The fear of loneliness is one
of those experiences
that Helen recognises.
It's one of those things that makes
us human, isn't it?
That we hope to be loved
and hope to love someone
and share our lives
in some capacity.
And for a lady, you know,
sadly, there's this pressure
and this sort of unspoken judgment
that if you're not cherished
by someone else,
or if a man doesn't find you
and treasure you,
then your worth is somehow...
somehow comes into question.
It's just the reality
of being a lady.
The Bridget Jones blueprint
of using comedy to explore
the pressures of modern
women's lives was so successful
that it inspired a new kind
of novel - chick lit.
Often, those books and those authors
don't get the recognition
they deserve,
because it's FOR women,
and therefore,
because it's FOR women,
it's somehow not worthy
and it's not intellectual enough
because it's talking about
how women feel.
And I don't even like the term
"chick lit".
You don't have "dick lit".
- Sorry, am I allowed to say that?
- LAUGHTER
When you look back at the history,
she creates a whole new genre.
That's an incredible achievement.
Culturally, that's very powerful.
She's helped shape, you know,
like, sort of two decades
of art and culture and literature.
Helen has now authored
four Bridget books
and co-written the three films.
When she brought the character back
for 2013's Mad About The Boy,
the book sold nearly 50,000 copies
in a day,
and was number one for six months.
Hello! Thank you.
Is this for you? Er... yes. Yeah.
Her friends call her Bridget.
Oh, really. Yeah.
What's she do, then?
Drinks white wine...
THEY LAUGH
I'm so pleased! I'm really pleased!
Thank you! Thank you for that.
I think the way readers relate
to Bridget
is perhaps rather similar to the way
women relate to each other,
which is that you do not, at the end
of the day, go to your girlfriends
and you say, "Oh, you'll never
guess what a marvellous day I've had
and how thin and perfect
and successful I am."
You say, "Give me a glass of wine.
You'll never believe
what I've just done today."
And it's the mutual
support in those situations.
Well, I'd always had
a rather grand idea...
Ooh, I'm supposed to use this,
aren't I?
- AUDIENCE LAUGHS
- Gets off to a great start!
Right, you don't...
Is it turned on? Yeah.
I'm so professional!
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
I was just wondering, how do you
think Bridget Jones would cope with,
like, the body-positivity movement
now?
Because obviously,
she focuses on her weight a lot.
I think she'd really welcome it,
but she'd still feel neurotic
about her body
and then feel guilty
for feeling neurotic about it.
It would add another layer of guilt
to the whole thing.
I still think there is, at the heart
of people, that sense,
"Am I good enough?
Am I doing it right?"
I was very surprised when I went on
the first book tours with Bridget.
The difference between the veneer
with women
and what's going on inside.
The number of women that came up
to me saying
they identified with all this
dieting and worrying,
who looked so slim, successful,
as if they had it all.
And I think it's kind of
a global epidemic,
this gap between how you feel
you're supposed to be
and how you really are.
I mean, even I, as you know,
I'm sort of struggling with filming
and, "Does my post-lockdown fat show
and am I wearing the right thing?"
That's really bad.
But it's a reality.
What should I be?
What do I need to be
in order to, um... present myself
as successful?
In order to be acceptable?
To be accepted, to be loved?
And when we learn that,
oh, that's kind of ridiculous, um...
..look how lovely she is,
and she isn't perfect
and she is a little chubby
and she doesn't have all the things
and she fails at pretending to be
what she's not.
And that's what makes us
love her so much. So much.
APPLAUSE
In my early 20s,
I can relate to her.
Teens can relate to her, especially
the pressures of social media today.
We're looking even more to people
who can show us
that it's OK to be different.
You know, she still makes mistakes,
but she's funny
and her friends love her and stuff.
My favourite bit is when she's
at the dinner party
with all the smug marrieds
and Darcy comes down the stairs
and chats away to her and says,
"I like you just the way you are."
Aw!
I like you. Very much.
Huh! Apart from the smoking
and the drinking
and the vulgar mother
and the verbal diarrhoea.
No, I like you very much.
Just as you are.
The fact that she is so vulnerable
at that moment,
for him to come out with that,
I think probably...
..is a little sort of
rather pleasant shock,
that he would so earnestly say
something nice to her.
When it came to finding
the perfect director,
Helen turned to none other than
her singleton pal Sharon Maguire.
So here we are, yeah.
This is Bridget's front door.
This is where Mr Darcy came
to claim her,
and where he came once again
to pick her up off the floor
when she was sitting there pregnant
and locked out of her flat.
Casting Bridget
was quite a scary thing
and, um... we decided in the end
to go for a Texan,
so there was much uproar
in the tabloids at the time.
There was a whole scandal about,
why isn't this a British actress?
HE SIGHS HEAVILY
And I didn't know Renee Zellweger
very well.
A Texan playing Bridget?
It did seem a stretch.
She completely immersed herself
into the process,
went to work in a publisher's
cos Bridget works in a publisher's.
I got a job at the publisher's
so I could understand
what that was like.
Taught me lots of things
about publishing
and book launches and filing things
and making the coffee.
Afternoon, Bridget.
I felt so brash.
I found that, oh, I'm going
to have to figure this out,
where you don't just come right out
and say,
"Ooh," you know, "I hate that,"
you know?
You say, "Hm.
Perhaps another might be better."
We, in fact, had her round to dinner
and she was very like Helen,
in that she was, you know,
a Hollywood actress,
but full of quirks.
You know, fluttered,
slightly panicked, very unusual.
So I felt that we felt that the soul
of her was incredibly accurate,
even though, as it were,
her accent wasn't.
She came in doing quite
a good British accent,
but she was Princess Margaret.
That was a little startling.
And then she was told to kind of,
I think,
or she thought she'd better
kind of loosen it up a bit.
And then then she came in
as Princess Margaret
having had a stroke.
SLURRED: You know,
it was rather, sort of...
And anyway, about a week later,
it was bang on.
Bridget Jones, wanton sex goddess
with a very bad man
between her thighs.
Mum!
THEY CLAMOUR
The Bridget films remain the most
successful romcoms of all time
at the British box office.
For Helen, though, this success
was a long time coming,
and somewhat left of field.
Her attempts at serious journalism
had taken her to East Africa,
which, in turn, inspired
her first novel, Cause Celeb,
a satire set in a refugee camp.
The reviews were good,
but sales sadly limited.
Then, in February of 1995,
the Independent newspaper
asked her to write a column.
I can remember one of our
executives, Charlie Leadbeater,
coming to me and saying,
"We've got this really, really
interesting idea for a column.
"It's like something that's never
been seen in British newspapers,"
and beginning to describe
what would become Bridget Jones,
and thinking this is exactly
the kind of thing that our readers,
who are mostly metropolitan, urban
professionals, might go for.
It was very unselfconscious,
you know. It was done very quickly.
The Independent asked me
if I'd write a column as myself
and I thought that was hopelessly
exposing and embarrassing,
so I said,
"Well, I'll make someone up."
And I really didn't want anyone
to know I was writing it
because it just seemed so silly.
Monday 6th March.
Can officially confirm that the way
to a man's heart these days
is not through beauty, food,
sex or alluringness of character,
but merely the ability to seem
not very interested in him.
It seems a long time ago now, but
the late 1990s was, in many ways,
quite an optimistic time
in Britain's history.
It was post-yuppie.
There was a sense of kind of snappy,
slightly misbehaving
urban professionals
erupting all over the place,
which absolutely fitted
Bridget Jones, of course.
This might be the first one.
Yep, this is the very first column.
As I remember it, it was when they
had the Traffic Cones Hotline.
It was something you could call up
if you had an issue
with cones on motorways,
or something.
So I think what I was trying to do
initially
was be quite journalistic
and find something funny from the
week's news to write about. So...
Sunday 26th February.
On top of everything,
I open the papers to find the bloody
Cones Hotline is being scrapped.
Who else am I supposed to ring up
late at night when I feel lonely?
Maybe they should rename it
the Cones Chatline,
or Cones Supportline.
That would be more '90s, I feel.
There were plenty of men at the top
of the Independent
and, subsequently,
who were reading it every week
and really looking forward to it.
Great comic writing isn't just
for one group or another group,
and this was great comic writing.
There wasn't much attention
to start with,
but then people started
mentioning it.
And it was only when my friend Tracey said,
"Have you seen this Bridget Jones column?"
I can remember the look on her face.
She looked really stricken
and she said,
"What do you think of it?"
And I said, "Oh, I think
it's really funny."
And she said, "Traila, I write it."
THEY LAUGH
And I went, "Oh, good."
I said the right thing!
Then a lot of letters
started to come in.
Probably by... I think it was, like,
week six,
when I'd really got into my stride
by then.
How can I have put on 3lb
since the middle of the night?
I can understand weight coming off -
it could have evaporated
or been passed out of the body
into the lavatory,
but how could it be put on?
There had not been a character
like Bridget
that somebody like me recognised.
And I was probably a similar age.
My whole life was spend chatting
with my friends
about how we were just, like,
messing everything up
and we were drinking too many
bottles of wine on a school night.
And suddenly, I read this column
and it was, like, boom!
Yes! This is us reflected
in literature and in art.
And we loved it.
Things can only get better...
One fan was becoming famous
for having the odd Bridget moment
herself.
And she was one of Bridget's
own role models.
Cherie Blair is fantastic!
You see, she, too, would probably
not fit into tiny bikinis
in communal changing rooms.
Maybe Cherie will now use
her influence over our new
Prime Minister,
who will order all clothes shops
to start producing clothes
that will fit attractively
over everyone's arses.
As an advocate in court,
you wear your wig and gown,
but it's what you say that matters,
not what you look like.
Suddenly, I then get thrust
into a position
where everything was about
how I looked.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
We won and we'd been up all night
and then that next morning,
he'd gone off to
start talking about important things
like, you know, forming the Cabinet,
and suddenly, the doorbell rings.
And I wasn't thinking,
just came out in my nightie,
and as I opened the door and I saw
the world's press outside,
I thought, "Oh, my God,
Tony will kill me for this,"
and I quickly shut the door again.
The funny thing is, as the spouse
of the Prime Minister,
yes, in some ways,
I was breaking with convention
because the assumption of the system
was that, obviously,
I would stop working.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Back in the '90s, we still
were not getting women CEOs,
women in the Cabinet.
It was still very much
a man's world.
Still is, really.
And I think that that's
what Bridget also finds,
that you have to fit in
with a male workplace
that doesn't really, at its heart,
take women seriously,
or think that they should be there.
So this is Primrose Hill,
this is what my life was
when I was writing Bridget.
And this is my old flat,
where I lived for about eight years.
And, yeah, I wrote Bridget up there.
Look!
Er... it was a really sweet
little flat.
It was all sort of slopey ceilings.
Not at all fancy.
I had a little office at the back
where I wrote,
and I remember laying out
all the columns on the carpet
and trying to stick them all
together in the right order
for the book.
I certainly remember when Helen got
the book deal, thinking, "Oh, that's nice,"
and the launch party being
quite small.
There wasn't a feeling that,
"This is the next big thing."
It was always like, "Oh, that's nice
for Helen, that's happening."
I didn't really have a plot,
but it was the time when the BBC's
Pride and Prejudice was showing
and everyone, including me,
was in love with Mr Darcy.
And I started writing the column
along the lines of the plot
of Pride and Prejudice.
'Cos I've never been that
great at plots
and I think that Pride And Prejudice
is the perfect novel.
And it'd been very well market-researched
over a number of centuries
and I thought Jane Austen wouldn't
mind. And anyway, she's dead.
Mr Darcy!
I couldn't really understand quite
why I was Darcy the first time.
I was bombarded with people
begging me not to play the part
because they were all in love
with Mr Darcy
and I just... I didn't fit.
They thought,
"You'll... you'll spoil it for ever."
Excuse me.
It was very odd, then, to be rooted
in the character in people's minds.
I just thought, "Join in the fun.
Get in on the joke.
If you're not laughing with them,
you might actually just be
a distant part of the joke anyway."
"It struck me as pretty
ridiculous to be called Mr Darcy
and to be standing on your own,
looking snooty at a party.
It's like being called Heathcliff
and insisting on spending the entire
evening in the garden,
shouting "Cathy" and banging
your head against a tree."
I should have done this years ago.
Done what? This.
Oof! Oh!
I barely ever worked with Hugh,
funnily enough.
All we've ever done is beat the shit
out of each other.
What the fuck do you think
you're doing?! This.
SHOCKED GASPS
We were discussing how we might
choreograph this very manly fight,
and it just occurred to us,
"How would we fight like that?"
I think it was me. I'm taking
credit. I rather bravely said,
"These are two middle-class men.
It would just be crap."
THEY GRUNT AND SHRIEK
It's quite difficult because they
get worried about health and safety
and they think, "Oh, you have to
have a stunt coordinator there."
And I think there was one there
on the day,
itching to come and improve it.
But we found the worse it was,
the better it was.
DARCY GRUNTS
Oh, God, I'm sorry!
I really am sorry!
I... I will pay. Had enough, Darcy?
It ended up being a masterstroke,
I think,
in a comedy, because cowardice...
..can be very, very funny,
particularly cowardice
and anger combined.
It's raining men, hallelujah
It's raining men...
THEY GRUNT AND GROAN
These are the galleys,
so you sort of hand it in
and then someone goes through with
a pen and marks all your mistakes.
"Wise people will say Daniel
should like me just as I am,
but I'm a child of Cosmopolitan
culture,
have been TRAUMETIZED..." -
spelt wrong - "..by supermodels
and too many quizzes. I am going to
cancel and spend the evening
eating doughnuts in
a cardigan with egg on it."
I don't think it even got
on the bestseller list.
But then when
the paperback came out,
there was this really exciting thing
that it went into the number six
spot of the Sunday Times
and then the next week, five,
four, three, two, one.
And then it just stayed there
and I was so excited
and I used to cut out the clipping,
but I stuck it inside
the lid of a box
because I didn't want to put it
on the wall or anything
if people came round, but I wanted
to lift the lid when I was on my own
and then it just stayed
at number one
and no-one could really
understand it.
I kind of was a bit surprised by it!
More fool me.
Because I kind of rather
thought of Helen as being
sort of attractively scatty.
And of course, what I didn't see
was the steel.
People think that Bridget's
a bit of a fool sometimes,
but she's no fool,
Bridget, as a character,
and Helen's no fool either.
I remember getting a train
out of Waterloo at rush hour
and every single woman on that train
was reading Bridget Jones's Diary,
and I thought, "She's done it."
To the publishing world's surprise,
Bridget became a word-of-mouth hit,
selling a staggering million copies.
Bridget was in the news...
Bridget Jones, a woman who has given
voice to a generation of women.
Bridget Jones's Diary has spent
25 weeks on the bestseller list.
Perhaps it means it's not
just Bridget in the modern world
who has a permanent sense
that she's not quite good enough.
..in comedy sketches...
Oh, Bridget Jones! Bridget Jones!
Bridget Jones, Bridget Jones...
..even started
a national conversation.
What we haven't managed to achieve
is to work out how we can possibly
work, have a great career,
have a family... We are. Yeah.
..and we're mopping up the sort
of mess... Oh, absolutely.
..that the original feminists
left behind.
But not everyone was a Bridget fan.
Fucking pink.
When Bridget first came out,
there were several quite serious
intellectual feminists
who were absolutely furious
and I could sort of see their point,
as I had at one point
written the line,
"There is nothing so unattractive
to a man as strident feminism,"
which was a multi-layered
ironic joke.
But I knew it
was going to annoy people.
I cannot believe I convinced myself
I was keeping
the entire weekend free to work
when in fact I was on
permanent date-with-Daniel standby.
Wasted two days glaring
psychopathically at the phone
and eating things.
I don't think
it's liberating at all, really.
One of the things
you're meant to believe is that
Bridget unlocks
the key to his heart.
Well, I'm buggered if
I know how she did it,
because she's been
nothing but a nuisance.
To Mark and his Natasha.
ALL: To Mark and his Natasha!
No. No!
What she's really looking for
is to be part of a couple.
Bridge, this is Hugo and Jane.
Hi. Hello. And obviously you know
Cosmo and Woney.BOTH: Hi, Bridge!
Universal coupledom buries all.
All those grisly parties
with all the spouses sitting around
saying she should
start a baby and all... Eugh!
You really ought to hurry up and
get sprogged up, you know, old girl.
Time's running out. Tick-tock.
The great moment is where
Mark Darcy is bending down
from his great height...
I'll be right with you.
And she ducks out
from under to change her pants.
And there she is, sort of
pulling out
her satin zebra-striped
knickers to put on.
In order to have a kiss,
you have to change your pants.
And they call that
glamorising, do they?
Jesus Christ.
I mean, he's going to
kiss you, girl.
You want him to kiss you?
My advice is kiss him back.
Don't worry about your pants.
In 2016, Woman's Hour
controversially included Bridget
in a list of the seven
most influential women
of the past seven decades.
Ayesha Hazarika was on the panel.
There's quite a lot of people
that were dead against it
and said this was outrageous and
this was, like, morally repugnant
and we should be all
kicked out of the sisterhood.
It's a deeply feminist thing to do,
to write a book that centres a woman
and her neuroses and
her genuine life experience.
I didn't feel the need for,
you know, Bridget to be
on marches all the time.
I don't want to call her
anti-feminist in any way,
because I don't think that she's...
I think she's someone who...
Does she know what she wants?
I actually don't know.
I don't know if she does.
Does she know what she wants?No.
I think she's just
sort of going through it.
I think she's a Gemini. I was
trying to figure that out today.
Have you ever felt
like Bridget Jones?
Definitely.
I mean, the time
when you feel like Bridget Jones
is when he doesn't call.
I think most women would think,
if they were totting up their life
statistics, would think
they'd spent too much time
waiting for calls that never came.
Bridget Jones had tapped
into something
that resonated globally.
The books went on to be
published in 40 countries,
selling 15 million copies.
There's me in Vogue.
I was so frightened and constantly
trying to hold my stomach in.
They put me in this pink dress
and then the photographer said...
FRENCH ACCENT: "Take her out of it.
She looks like a sausage."
I spent about two years,
really, on the road,
so it was quite lonely sometimes
and always ending up,
you know, in a hotel,
eating the M&Ms in the minibar.
But what a life, you know?
Essentially, it's been
the most fantastic thing
that could happen to
any writer, really,
unless you wanted to be
a very serious literary novelist,
which, of course, I do. And
I firmly believe there's still time.
Here she is.
In the years since, Helen found love
and had two kids, Dash and Romy.
I know. Who put it there?
And she's still having
the odd Bridget moment.
One time she had prepared us some
beef stew, it was very fancy looking
and it smelled amazing,
until I bit into a teabag.
I remember one time she managed
to set the pasta on fire
while she was cooking it.
But, really,
when it comes to a family,
all you want to do is have fun.
And I think that is something
that our mum does very well.
She's very good at entertaining us.
So I would say that she is pretty
close to being the perfect mother.
If the concept of Bridget
is supportive to the value
of being who you are,
being human, being kind,
being vulnerable,
honest, supportive to your friends,
and being able to laugh at yourself
and see the world through
a humorous perspective,
then that's... that's pretty good.
I think it's about just
being the person that you are,
even if it is scatty or silly
or someone who slides down
a fireman's pole
and shows her knickers to the nation
because the stuff happens, you know?
Definitely, I'd say a role model,
particularly in this day and age.
I think to admit fault
and have a laugh at how far you fall
is lovely and soothing.
I think what it boils down to
in the end is... is self-acceptance.
I think it's appreciating
that being imperfect is
what you're supposed to be.
We're not going to get it right
and that's perfectly fine.
OK. Good. I think we've said it all,
really, now, haven't we?
I never want to hear
another word about the woman.
LAUGHTER
Bitch.
If you smile at the sun
The sun will smile at you
If you laugh at the rain
Your rainbow will come through
Keep looking for those bluebirds
And bluebirds you will find
There really are no skies of grey
They're only in your mind
If you plant daffodils
then daffodils will grow...
The best shot in the whole show!
New Year's resolutions.
I will not...
..bitch about anyone
behind their backs,
but be positive about everyone.
..get upset over men,
but instead be poised and cool
like an ice-queen.
..sulk about having no boyfriend,
but develop inner poise
and authority,
complete without boyfriend,
as best way to obtain boyfriend.
..fall for any of the following -
alcoholics, workaholics,
commitment phobics,
misogynists,
megalomaniacs, chauvinists,
emotional fuckwits or freeloaders,
perverts.
25 years ago, Helen Fielding
introduced us to a new character.
For this documentary, I went
into the attic.
I was quite pleased when I found
this, because that's the proof
of Bridget Jones with some
coffee on it.
It's funny looking at it, because,
of course, I had no idea
that this was going to be a book
that changed my life so much.
No idea.
Now, for the very first time,
Helen's going to help us
understand Bridget
a little better...
The truth is, I was really, really
nervous about this filming,
because I was going to lose a stone.
But of course, the lockdown
came in the middle of it,
and so now I'm hiding
underneath the table.
..by telling her own story.
This is really the original
Bridget Jones' diary.
This was my diary.
We'll be meeting friends and family
who inspired many of the characters.
I think I'm too dull to appear
in the books.
And the fans Bridget inspired.
Bridget Jones's Diary is
definitely the first place
that I understood that women
didn't have to be perfect.
Oh, and go on, then,
some film stars too.
I just thought, join in the fun.
I mean, get in on the joke.
I should have done this years ago.
Done what?
This! Ooh!
Hello, Mummy.
That was definitely me.
The male producers didn't
really understand
why big pants would be funny.
Who knew?
You know, they really
didn't get big pants.
People loved the big pants joke.
Who knew?
Everyone knows diaries are just
full of crap.
I make friends every day because
of Bridget Jones.
Someone comes up and says,
"I learned this from Bridget,"
or, "She means so much
to me because..."
You know? What a gift.
This is the story of how an anxious,
calorie-obsessed,
usually pissed singleton in her
30s changed the world.
You think you're making
an interesting documentary,
but all anyone at home
is thinking is,
"Fuck me, look how old
they are now.
"Look at the state of Hugh!"
Christmas 1969.
One day, many years ago,
Fanny Cradock and Mrs Beaton
decided to bake
some currant biscuits.
My dad used to make films
when we were little -
it was his hobby - on Super 8.
I look at this one-year-old...
..Fielding, and I think...
..that was just like a little
miniature Bridget Jones.
Now take an egg...
This is my favourite bit.
Just like...
Oh, well... Take another egg.
So hopeless,
so confused by the world.
TRAY CLATTERS
I think this is was the first
Bridget Jones moment, frankly -
not learning by mistakes,
ever optimistic.
I think the thing about
Bridget Jones' moments
is the perfection of imperfection.
It's the fact that the things
that go wrong are much more fun
than just having perfect biscuits,
which, frankly, you could
go buy in a shop.
A Bridget moment -
it's sort of like -
what was that famous quote
about irony? -
it's hard to describe,
but I'll know it when I see it.
I think in Bridget Jones's Baby,
the mud is one of my favourites.
"I may be old and inappropriately
dressed, but at least
"I look fucking amazing."
Woo!
I also loved when she has to go
to a very formal affair
and she can't get up the stairs
because the dress is too tight
round the ankles.
Been there!
It's thinking you've just nailed
it in terms of your wardrobe,
and you go out there with all
the confidence in the world,
and it's the toilet paper stuck
to your shoe, or something.
Hello. Bridget, I think you should
go to the ladies.
But I went before I left home.
Trust me on this one.
SHE GASPS
The comedy of awkwardness,
which I'm sure is global,
but I think it is, to me,
very, very identifiably British.
Maybe this was
the mysterious Mr Right
I'd been waiting my whole
life to meet...
You remember Bridget?
Maybe not.
I think there are people from other
cultures who don't really enjoy
cringing quite as much as we do.
Smile at the sun and the sun
will always smile
If you smile at the sun...
To understand the beginnings
of Bridget,
you have to look to Helen's
hometown of Morley in Yorkshire,
where the northern sense of humour
was instilled from a young age.
I want to make it clear that
I'm not actually working class.
Much as I'd like to seem
more interesting by saying that,
I'm really not,
I'm middle class,
however, I did grow up around
the closeness of people
and the talking over
the washing line.
When I look at a fence like this,
I always think of Les Dawson.
He was always talking over the
fence to his friends
and they always had these corsets on
he was lifting up and...
SHE MOUTHS
I had to change me seat three
times in the pictures,
because of men. No!
Were you interfered with?
Eventually.
And I think a lot of the roots
of the jokes in Bridget
are probably because I grew up with
Morecambe and Wise,
who came from Morley. Or Ernie did.
We used to watch Morecambe and Wise
every Saturday night.
It was all the thing
like Shirley Bassey
walking down the staircase,
being all fancy...
..I gave you love
To think it could die...
..then her foot goes through
the staircase.
That was the atmosphere - that you
don't get fancy, you don't get
above yourself and you make fun.
We were off again, our first
holiday in the new Dormobile.
I suppose Bridget's dad is quite
like my dad, in a way.
Very gentle and supportive.
He was also terribly funny.
And now, ladies and gentlemen,
we present Helen
in her death-defying dive.
He was a really good man -
as Bridget's dad is and Jim
Broadbent is - through and through.
Hello, Dad. Hello, darling.
How's it going? Torture!
Your mother's trying to fix
you up with some divorcee. Oh.
I think Bridget's mum
is quite interesting.
Bridget's mum was always
trying to change her.
Now, what are you going to put on?
This. Oh, don't be silly, Bridget.
Now run upstairs, laid out something
lovely on your bed.
Change, be different -
which is not the case
at all with my own mum.
Helen dedicated the first Bridget
Jones book to her mum Nellie...
..for not being like Bridget's.
Nellie still lives
in Yorkshire today.
If you were describing Bridget Jones
to someone who doesn't know her,
what would you say?
I'd say she was like you.
Thank you very much.
She likes life.
She likes chocolate.
She likes having fun.
And do you think it's true that
laughter can help you
through difficult times?
Definitely true.
With the help of some chocolate.
There's some aspects of Bridget's
mum which I took from my mum.
One of them is her obsession
with food.
Another one of Mother's
culinary triumphs -
everything in miniature.
Mini treacle tart, Admiral Darcy?
Erm, no. No, thank you.
The mini spotted dick rather
finished me off.
THEY CHUCKLE
My mum was a domestic
science teacher,
and she'd grown up with rationing.
So when there wasn't rationing any
more, she was just in paradise.
You used to cook, didn't you?
Everything. We used to see people
eating in very posh restaurants
and then go home and have
the same things.
They were good years.
Very good years.
What would you say were the most
important things in life?
Don't say chocolate.
Love.
Because love covers everything.
Every argument, seriously or not,
can be sorted out with love.
Helen's first attempts as a writer
came in her teenage years...
..with romantic poetry.
I took myself quite seriously,
so this is, like -
I'm lying in the bath
feeling melancholy
Just wallowing in self-pity
And warm and wet and happy
and soft and sad
Though something, somewhere
In my head
Keeps saying,
You really loved him, didn't you?
And another bit
Oh, come on, pull yourself together
now, Fielding.
Oh, God.
It must be love
Love, love...
Helen thrived in school,
and life changed for ever when this
grammar school girl
swapped Yorkshire for
Oxford University.
I was quite intimidated by Oxford.
I didn't really like it
to start with.
I wasn't confident at all.
I felt a bit out of my depth.
And if I could go back and give
advice to...
..to myself then, I would've said,
"Just don't worry.
If you had been to public school
or you were from the south
or anything like that, just enjoy
it. You were there for a reason."
This was the moment I think it
sort of turned around for me.
I got a part playing
Marlene Dietrich,
and this bloke came up to me
and said,
"Oh, I say, that was jolly good.
I'd like to be your boyfriend."
And I was like, "Oh, God,
these public school boys.
That's the sort of thing
that really annoys me."
Anyway, it was Richard Curtis.
The first time I saw Helen, she was
acting very badly in a play.
We went out with each other
for a while,
but I wasn't good-looking enough,
really, for her.
Richard was living in a house
with lots of other guys,
including Rowan Atkinson.
They always say that they thought
I was really sophisticated
till I opened my mouth and this
Yorkshire accent came out.
She was absolutely remarkable
and magical.
She was so northern,
so friendly,
wasn't conscientious, didn't appear
to have read any books,
liked pop music.
She was so not stuck-up.
My nightmare is a friend
to whom you say, you know,
"How have you been?"
And they say, "Fine."
Whereas if you say,
"How have you been?" to Helen,
you're there for an hour-and-a-half.
And it's all going to be sort of
funny or interesting or quirky
or insulting or panicky, you know?
She just makes life,
and particularly her life,
an exceptionally interesting story.
So this... this is really
the original Bridget Jones' diary.
This was my diary from university.
And when I looked back,
I was horrified to see that there
were very few social engagements,
but an awful lot of lists like this.
Alpen - 300 calories.
Leeks - 20 calories.
Rhubarb and sugar - 50 calories.
Custard - 150 calories.
Steak - 100 calories.
That's not right!
Banana - 100 calories.
Custard again - 200 calories.
Weetabix, soup, Wall's Viennetta.
SHE CHUCKLES
Look, here we've got my weight -
8st 7lb!
Why was I counting my calories
when I weighed 8st 7lb?
Somehow, even by then,
it had all got to me
and I was trying to be different.
Thinner. Better.
Sunday 15th January.
9st. Excellent.
Alcohol units - three.
Cigarettes - four.
Calories - 3,879. Repulsive!
Negative thoughts - 942.
Minutes spent counting
negative thoughts -
127, approximately.
Being a woman is worse
than being a farmer.
There's so much harvesting and
crop spraying to be done. Legs...
..to be waxed, underarms shaved,
eyebrows...
..plucked, feet pumiced, skin
exfoliated, moisturised, spots...
..cleansed, roots dyed,
eyelashes tinted, nails...
..filed, cellulite massaged,
stomach muscles exercised.
Sometimes I wonder what I would be
like if left to revert to nature.
With a full beard and handlebar
moustache on each shin.
Is it any wonder
girls have no confidence?
I think that there are certain
themes that Helen is exploring
very sneakily, um... with her humour,
that are universal.
No-one is born with Zen-like
perspective,
where you can look at something
and see that it's futile,
or see that it has no value.
And we sidestep it completely
into self-acceptance
in this wonderful, fabulous life,
where we're not expending energy
on ridiculous things,
like how much we weigh,
or what we look like in a dress,
or our hair, or whether or not
we've achieved this list of things
that other people value by the time
we're 30 or 40 or 50.
She struggles with it and she tries
and she fails, like all of us.
BRIDGET PUFFS AND GROANS
It's a sort of celebration
of failure, of being a bit shit.
You know she aspires to change
her life, make it better.
"Will lose 10lb,
will stop smoking."
And then it's the fun,
the celebration of never achieving
any of that
and just having to go and get
pissed on Chardonnay,
and I think that's quite
an interesting contrast
between that and Instagram culture.
All these women saying
to each other,
"Blessed! Having a wonderful time!
"Everything's perfect!
Kids - perfect!"
You know, for someone to debunk
all that,
or to pull the rug from under
all that and say,
"Well, it's all a bit shit
"and we are competing,
but, you know, we never make it,
"and let's just have another, let's
get pissed again and have a fag,"
is bliss.
Bridget's neuroses were devoured
by a generation of young female fans
in the '90s.
One of them was MP Jess Phillips.
I wish there was some silver bullet,
but I also wish I was a size 10.
Ah...
And another was
Candice Carty-Williams,
whose best-selling novel Queenie
was partly inspired
by her love of the Bridget books.
I absolutely loved it.
And it seems funny to me now,
as if, like, I could see
my future self!
Cos I was a 16-year-old kid.
I had read the first two when I was
definitely too young.
I think they helped me get through
a lot of...
You know, I was someone who also,
like, made a lot of mistakes,
and I wasn't very together.
As a black woman, I was also like,
"OK, I should be strong,"
but then I felt this affinity
to this, like, white woman
who was also getting into
messy situations.
Black women are not represented
in film, TV, books.
Like, where do you find yourself?
I never found myself.
So I kept going back to Bridget
as this person
who could also mess up.
Alcohol units - three.
Calories - 759.
Entirely ice cream.
Up until that point,
there were very few books
about what it was like to be
a young woman.
To, like, be annoyed
with your period coming,
or having dirty hair
and never being able to get it
to style the right way.
And it sounds so flippant
when I say that,
that, like, you'd always have
a stupid kink in your hair
that, literally, is like
a universal issue,
but no-one has ever written it down
in a book before.
There definitely was a massive
amount of pressure then
to be very, very thin.
You were waif-like and perfect.
And then there's this book
that actually talks about
your real-life experiences
as if they are valid.
It was just about us.
And that... that matters.
Bridget Jones's Diary was
definitely the first place
that I understood that women
didn't have to be perfect.
And that was really important.
I think that now, more than ever,
we are able to talk about that.
And I think that... Of course, like,
Helen's legacy is, like, huge.
Another element that resonated
with readers
was Bridget's struggle
as a woman in the workplace,
and many of her escapades
were directly inspired by
Helen's own early career.
It was carrot craziness.
It was a national carrot obsession.
It's like being an important
scientist in a chemistry laboratory,
doing an experiment.
When I left college,
I was seduced by the glamour
of the BBC!
The news editor in Bristol
thought he saw some promise in me,
so he took me to work
in the regional newsroom.
I think that Helly was part
of a generation that felt confident
when they burst out of university.
And then they did find the clash
with reality was quite,
you know, harsh when I don't know
that there were any women
in the upper echelons of the BBC,
but it was definitely a thought
that maybe this generation
would be the one to break through.
You'd give them a story
in the morning and they'd say,
"Yes! Let's go with it!"
So then I'd go zooming off
to shoot something.
The most traumatic one was
the 90-year-old parachute jumper,
went up in the airplane and they
were saying, "Jump, Archie, jump!"
I can't see anywhere soft to land!
How about on your arse?
And they said, "Look,
there's a nice soft field. Jump!"
And he jumps and it wasn't a field,
it was a sewage works.
BRIDGET YELLS
And then I was left sort of
cleaning up the mess
and he'd gone over his head
in the sewage and...
Bridget? You're on.
This is Bridget Jones
for Sit Up Britain,
reporting to you
from a big vat of excrement.
And I did a little bit
of presenting,
but not very successfully.
The butterflies give the show
a special conservation theme.
Helen Fielding reports.
Oh, yeah, this was when I moved
to John Craven's Newsround.
..set up the spectacular displays.
You'd hardly think of butterflies
as a home accessory,
but nobody's expecting
anyone to buy them.
They're here because this is
butterfly year,
aimed at preserving...
When the presenting really got bad,
it was when it was live,
and the worst one was the birth
of the royal baby.
They're running up to record now.
Right. Shall I practise it?
All the camera crews were outside
the hospital.
Someone suddenly went,
"Helen, go! Go! Go! Go! Go!"
Well, it's all feverish excitement
here outside the hospital
and you can feel it rising
by the minute.
And I went, "Argh! The baby
hasn't been born yet,
"but it's all very exciting.
Now back to the studio."
SHE LAUGHS
I always had these ideas
of what I wanted to be,
but, almost invariably,
it turned out
that I wasn't quite... quite
capable of it.
It actually made me quite
self-conscious, being on screen.
And now back to the studio!
All the things that you would most
like
not to have in common with
Bridget...
..are the things that I find...
..I relate to, um, most closely.
Welcome to the launch of
Kafka's Motorbike,
the Greatest Book of our Time!
TRICKLE OF APPLAUSE
Obviously, except for your books,
Mr Rushdie.
I've had moments where I feel like
I'm sitting beside myself,
watching my Bridget alter ego
just spiralling,
circling the drain.
And, Lord Archer,
yours aren't bad either.
The words need to stop,
but just keep coming.
The wrong words,
they just keep coming.
Thank you for coming to the launch
of one of the Top 30 books
of our time,
anyway... at least...
There came a point when I decided
that the thing I really wanted to do
was be a writer, and that I should
really get on with it and try.
I wrote this Mills & Boon
called Fires Of Zanzibar,
and I thought that was an easy way
to start.
And then I got a letter back
from them rejecting the novel
and saying that neither
my characters nor my story were
up to the high standards demanded
by the Mills & Boon reader.
The last paragraph, the doctor was
pulling the nurse to him roughly,
and she looked up at him,
tremblingly,
and then he said,
"It's all right, it isn't a snake."
And I sort of saw their point.
There was quite a lot of rejection
in my attempts to be a writer.
It didn't come easy.
Helen switched tack from television
and started making progress
as a newspaper journalist,
writing some impressively
serious pieces.
At the same time, the sexism
of the '90s workplace
was sowing the seeds
of more Bridget comedy.
Happy New Year, Mr Fitzherbert.
Happy New Year, Brenda.
Mr Fitzherbert - Tits Pervert,
more like.
Daniel's boss who stares freely
at my breasts
with no idea who I am or what I do.
Then there was the added confusion
of how you deal with a charming boss
you secretly really fancy.
"Come on, Bridge," he said,
leaning towards me seductively.
"I need to have a serious
discussion about your blouse.
"It's extremely thin.
"Almost, when you examine it, thin
to the point of transparency.
"'I've got to meet someone, '
I whispered desperately."
That's Bridget.
"'Shame, ' he said softly.
'Well, I'll see you Monday, '
"and gave me a look so dirty, I felt
like throwing myself after him,
"shouting, 'Shag me! Shag me!'"
You see, that's very Helen.
Helen is, really,
apart from, you know,
talent and achievement and all that,
a dirty, dirty bitch.
It's what my mother's generation,
sort of '50s,
would've called
"not safe in taxis".
Er... you know, he's a predator.
Type casting.
You're looking very sexy, Jones.
I think I'm going to have to take
you out to dinner now,
whether you like it or not.
I always feel like I'm going to get
into trouble
from the conversations
that we'll have on the side bar
when we're filming.
I always feel like, "I shouldn't
have... I shouldn't have said that.
I shouldn't have..."
He's a lot of fun.
Hugh, it was not my suggestion,
but was an absolutely brilliant
suggestion,
and, in fact, a lot of the lines
were adlibs by Hugh.
"This is a very silly little dress,
Jones,
"and these are very silly
little boots."
And, um... these... are...
"These are... fuck me, absolutely
enormous pants." That was me.
Fuck! No, no, don't apologise,
I like them.
And then the bits that followed,
"Don't worry, I'm wearing
something quite similar myself..."
"Hello, Mummy!"
That was definitely me.
Sorry, I have to have another look.
They're too good to be true. No!
I remember when I watched it
and there's the
bum on the hand in the lift,
isn't there?
And she does that sort of like,
"Hm!"
Um... I remember being surprised
by that.
Because obviously, you're kind of
like, "Why are you touching her?
"She doesn't want to be touched."
Certainly, as I've got older,
I'm, like, that's harassment.
And, like, she's lucky... He's lucky
that she fancies him
because he could be in trouble.
She's essentially sexually harassed.
I don't blame Helen for writing it
like that,
because that is the way that...
..then...
..women were expected to experience
their working environment.
Nowadays, you'd be straight
before a tribunal.
Incidentally, at Sit Up Britain,
no-one ever gets sacked
for shagging the boss.
That's a matter of principle.
I went to see the first
Bridget movie
for the first time
in about 15 years,
and I was just completely startled
by the fact
that you really couldn't
make that movie now.
The number of shots
with the hand on the bum,
Mr Tits Pervert, Richard Finch,
"Let's get a shot of the tits."
Um...
And I think, "Thank you, Me Too".
The Me Too movement inspired Helen
to bring Bridget back in 2018
for a one-off diary entry.
"What did I put up with
in the days of these diaries?
I just accepted that part and parcel
of having a job was that my boss
would stare freely at my breasts,
not know my name
and ask me to put a tight dress on
to make an idiotic speech.
None of that could happen now.
Mr Fitzherbert and Richard Finch
would lose their jobs, no question."
Helen had sorted out her career.
But by the early 1990s,
she found herself in her 30s
and terminally single.
Luckily, her best mates
were in the same boat.
Tracey MacLeod was the presenter
of BBC's The Late Show.
Good evening. Good evening.
Good evening.
And Sharon Maguire
was one of its directors.
They later became the basis of
Bridget's mates, Shazzer and Jude.
You should have said, "I'm not
married because I'm a singleton,
"you smug, prematurely ageing,
narrow-minded morons,"
Shazzer ranted.
"There's a whole generation
of single girls like me
"with our own incomes and homes
"who have lots of fun and don't need
to wash anyone else's socks."
"Singletons!" I shouted happily.
"Hurrah for the singletons!"
I think we were all slightly aware
that the, um... gene pool
of available
potential boyfriends
and life partners
was diminishing quite quickly.
And we probably, for that reason,
made some quite bad
relationship decisions.
It was a bit like, you know,
the last 'copter out of Saigon.
We grabbed a few ropes that
we probably shouldn't have grabbed
and then we'd come together
and we'd tell each other about them.
But it was just a lot of fun.
I don't think any of us
were conforming to
what you were supposed to do
in your mid-30s -
ie, have a husband, have babies -
but I was questioning myself as to,
"Well, if I'm not going to go
and do that sort of thing,
"what is the meaning of life, then?"
And the answer, it turned out,
was to go out and get trashed a lot.
Tracey and Sharon and I
were a little gang.
I was doing restaurant reviews
and we used to turn them into
a minibreak
and we went to Burford,
we bought matching jelly shoes.
And then, during the restaurant
review, we were laughing so much
that Tracey was sick on the plate,
but we didn't realise.
It was one of those classic things
where she could've died, you know?
Someone had to do
the Heimlich manoeuvre.
Helen was also borrowing the best
stories of her two gay best friends,
Daniel Wood and Richard Coles,
to create the character Tom.
Tom is the gay male friend,
which Dan and I have both been
that person.
And so, we scan Helen's treatment
of that character
with particular interest.
THEY LAUGH
Slightly snatching away from it!
I think you'll find...!
I think you'll find...!
There was a bit where Tom had
a nose job.
And that was from the experience
of somebody else.
And when that happened, we all rather
distanced ourselves from Tom at that point.
You could see that...
But then you think about
the parts of Tom that are the warm,
witty and wise friend, that's me.
- I feel that's me. Yeah, yeah.
- THEY LAUGH
The other thing that's
weird is that so many bits
of the experience are replayed out
in the book and then in the film.
And the bit that I keep coming
back to
is the bit about the blue soup
and the string.
Because I remember things
going wrong with blue string.
Delicious. Really special.
It's really... it's really very good.
It really is very nice.
THEY LAUGH
One of the things I remember
with most admiration,
as well as affection, with Helen,
is the way Bridget was her...
was a battle for her.
She was kind of fighting a fight
that I recognised.
She was a woman in her 30s
standing on her own two feet,
trying to make a living.
Lots of her circle of friends
were kind of effortlessly
seeming to conquer the world.
And lots of the women were,
of course, married to alpha males.
And she deliberately chose
not to do that.
And she made her own way
in the world.
I think the fictional representation
of a single girl in her 30s
was way outdated,
and there was still the notion
of Miss Havisham hanging around,
and I guess I was just privately
trying to correct that.
You think of Bridget Jones
as this kind of good-time
'90s, you know,
feel-good phenomenon.
And actually, it does come from
a place of, um... dislocation,
anxiety, not quite knowing
where you fit in.
I think the reason why the books
and the films became so popular
was, um... because they're about
loneliness.
They're about the fear
of loneliness.
All by myself
Any more...
ANSWERMACHINE: You have no messages.
I remember an interesting thing
about making the film work.
The big moment was grabbing a scene
that was originally much later
in the film,
which is Bridget alone in her room,
singing,
and shoving it right at the front
of the film.
And that was the point at which
audiences, test audiences,
completely sympathised with her,
as well as laughing with her.
Don't wanna be all by myself
Any more...
Really, that is what it's about.
Maybe at its deepest level,
it's terror of being alone.
It's Bridget's terror of
dying alone, eaten by Alsatians.
Because we're all terrified of that,
and it's coming.
The fear of loneliness is one
of those experiences
that Helen recognises.
It's one of those things that makes
us human, isn't it?
That we hope to be loved
and hope to love someone
and share our lives
in some capacity.
And for a lady, you know,
sadly, there's this pressure
and this sort of unspoken judgment
that if you're not cherished
by someone else,
or if a man doesn't find you
and treasure you,
then your worth is somehow...
somehow comes into question.
It's just the reality
of being a lady.
The Bridget Jones blueprint
of using comedy to explore
the pressures of modern
women's lives was so successful
that it inspired a new kind
of novel - chick lit.
Often, those books and those authors
don't get the recognition
they deserve,
because it's FOR women,
and therefore,
because it's FOR women,
it's somehow not worthy
and it's not intellectual enough
because it's talking about
how women feel.
And I don't even like the term
"chick lit".
You don't have "dick lit".
- Sorry, am I allowed to say that?
- LAUGHTER
When you look back at the history,
she creates a whole new genre.
That's an incredible achievement.
Culturally, that's very powerful.
She's helped shape, you know,
like, sort of two decades
of art and culture and literature.
Helen has now authored
four Bridget books
and co-written the three films.
When she brought the character back
for 2013's Mad About The Boy,
the book sold nearly 50,000 copies
in a day,
and was number one for six months.
Hello! Thank you.
Is this for you? Er... yes. Yeah.
Her friends call her Bridget.
Oh, really. Yeah.
What's she do, then?
Drinks white wine...
THEY LAUGH
I'm so pleased! I'm really pleased!
Thank you! Thank you for that.
I think the way readers relate
to Bridget
is perhaps rather similar to the way
women relate to each other,
which is that you do not, at the end
of the day, go to your girlfriends
and you say, "Oh, you'll never
guess what a marvellous day I've had
and how thin and perfect
and successful I am."
You say, "Give me a glass of wine.
You'll never believe
what I've just done today."
And it's the mutual
support in those situations.
Well, I'd always had
a rather grand idea...
Ooh, I'm supposed to use this,
aren't I?
- AUDIENCE LAUGHS
- Gets off to a great start!
Right, you don't...
Is it turned on? Yeah.
I'm so professional!
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
I was just wondering, how do you
think Bridget Jones would cope with,
like, the body-positivity movement
now?
Because obviously,
she focuses on her weight a lot.
I think she'd really welcome it,
but she'd still feel neurotic
about her body
and then feel guilty
for feeling neurotic about it.
It would add another layer of guilt
to the whole thing.
I still think there is, at the heart
of people, that sense,
"Am I good enough?
Am I doing it right?"
I was very surprised when I went on
the first book tours with Bridget.
The difference between the veneer
with women
and what's going on inside.
The number of women that came up
to me saying
they identified with all this
dieting and worrying,
who looked so slim, successful,
as if they had it all.
And I think it's kind of
a global epidemic,
this gap between how you feel
you're supposed to be
and how you really are.
I mean, even I, as you know,
I'm sort of struggling with filming
and, "Does my post-lockdown fat show
and am I wearing the right thing?"
That's really bad.
But it's a reality.
What should I be?
What do I need to be
in order to, um... present myself
as successful?
In order to be acceptable?
To be accepted, to be loved?
And when we learn that,
oh, that's kind of ridiculous, um...
..look how lovely she is,
and she isn't perfect
and she is a little chubby
and she doesn't have all the things
and she fails at pretending to be
what she's not.
And that's what makes us
love her so much. So much.
APPLAUSE
In my early 20s,
I can relate to her.
Teens can relate to her, especially
the pressures of social media today.
We're looking even more to people
who can show us
that it's OK to be different.
You know, she still makes mistakes,
but she's funny
and her friends love her and stuff.
My favourite bit is when she's
at the dinner party
with all the smug marrieds
and Darcy comes down the stairs
and chats away to her and says,
"I like you just the way you are."
Aw!
I like you. Very much.
Huh! Apart from the smoking
and the drinking
and the vulgar mother
and the verbal diarrhoea.
No, I like you very much.
Just as you are.
The fact that she is so vulnerable
at that moment,
for him to come out with that,
I think probably...
..is a little sort of
rather pleasant shock,
that he would so earnestly say
something nice to her.
When it came to finding
the perfect director,
Helen turned to none other than
her singleton pal Sharon Maguire.
So here we are, yeah.
This is Bridget's front door.
This is where Mr Darcy came
to claim her,
and where he came once again
to pick her up off the floor
when she was sitting there pregnant
and locked out of her flat.
Casting Bridget
was quite a scary thing
and, um... we decided in the end
to go for a Texan,
so there was much uproar
in the tabloids at the time.
There was a whole scandal about,
why isn't this a British actress?
HE SIGHS HEAVILY
And I didn't know Renee Zellweger
very well.
A Texan playing Bridget?
It did seem a stretch.
She completely immersed herself
into the process,
went to work in a publisher's
cos Bridget works in a publisher's.
I got a job at the publisher's
so I could understand
what that was like.
Taught me lots of things
about publishing
and book launches and filing things
and making the coffee.
Afternoon, Bridget.
I felt so brash.
I found that, oh, I'm going
to have to figure this out,
where you don't just come right out
and say,
"Ooh," you know, "I hate that,"
you know?
You say, "Hm.
Perhaps another might be better."
We, in fact, had her round to dinner
and she was very like Helen,
in that she was, you know,
a Hollywood actress,
but full of quirks.
You know, fluttered,
slightly panicked, very unusual.
So I felt that we felt that the soul
of her was incredibly accurate,
even though, as it were,
her accent wasn't.
She came in doing quite
a good British accent,
but she was Princess Margaret.
That was a little startling.
And then she was told to kind of,
I think,
or she thought she'd better
kind of loosen it up a bit.
And then then she came in
as Princess Margaret
having had a stroke.
SLURRED: You know,
it was rather, sort of...
And anyway, about a week later,
it was bang on.
Bridget Jones, wanton sex goddess
with a very bad man
between her thighs.
Mum!
THEY CLAMOUR
The Bridget films remain the most
successful romcoms of all time
at the British box office.
For Helen, though, this success
was a long time coming,
and somewhat left of field.
Her attempts at serious journalism
had taken her to East Africa,
which, in turn, inspired
her first novel, Cause Celeb,
a satire set in a refugee camp.
The reviews were good,
but sales sadly limited.
Then, in February of 1995,
the Independent newspaper
asked her to write a column.
I can remember one of our
executives, Charlie Leadbeater,
coming to me and saying,
"We've got this really, really
interesting idea for a column.
"It's like something that's never
been seen in British newspapers,"
and beginning to describe
what would become Bridget Jones,
and thinking this is exactly
the kind of thing that our readers,
who are mostly metropolitan, urban
professionals, might go for.
It was very unselfconscious,
you know. It was done very quickly.
The Independent asked me
if I'd write a column as myself
and I thought that was hopelessly
exposing and embarrassing,
so I said,
"Well, I'll make someone up."
And I really didn't want anyone
to know I was writing it
because it just seemed so silly.
Monday 6th March.
Can officially confirm that the way
to a man's heart these days
is not through beauty, food,
sex or alluringness of character,
but merely the ability to seem
not very interested in him.
It seems a long time ago now, but
the late 1990s was, in many ways,
quite an optimistic time
in Britain's history.
It was post-yuppie.
There was a sense of kind of snappy,
slightly misbehaving
urban professionals
erupting all over the place,
which absolutely fitted
Bridget Jones, of course.
This might be the first one.
Yep, this is the very first column.
As I remember it, it was when they
had the Traffic Cones Hotline.
It was something you could call up
if you had an issue
with cones on motorways,
or something.
So I think what I was trying to do
initially
was be quite journalistic
and find something funny from the
week's news to write about. So...
Sunday 26th February.
On top of everything,
I open the papers to find the bloody
Cones Hotline is being scrapped.
Who else am I supposed to ring up
late at night when I feel lonely?
Maybe they should rename it
the Cones Chatline,
or Cones Supportline.
That would be more '90s, I feel.
There were plenty of men at the top
of the Independent
and, subsequently,
who were reading it every week
and really looking forward to it.
Great comic writing isn't just
for one group or another group,
and this was great comic writing.
There wasn't much attention
to start with,
but then people started
mentioning it.
And it was only when my friend Tracey said,
"Have you seen this Bridget Jones column?"
I can remember the look on her face.
She looked really stricken
and she said,
"What do you think of it?"
And I said, "Oh, I think
it's really funny."
And she said, "Traila, I write it."
THEY LAUGH
And I went, "Oh, good."
I said the right thing!
Then a lot of letters
started to come in.
Probably by... I think it was, like,
week six,
when I'd really got into my stride
by then.
How can I have put on 3lb
since the middle of the night?
I can understand weight coming off -
it could have evaporated
or been passed out of the body
into the lavatory,
but how could it be put on?
There had not been a character
like Bridget
that somebody like me recognised.
And I was probably a similar age.
My whole life was spend chatting
with my friends
about how we were just, like,
messing everything up
and we were drinking too many
bottles of wine on a school night.
And suddenly, I read this column
and it was, like, boom!
Yes! This is us reflected
in literature and in art.
And we loved it.
Things can only get better...
One fan was becoming famous
for having the odd Bridget moment
herself.
And she was one of Bridget's
own role models.
Cherie Blair is fantastic!
You see, she, too, would probably
not fit into tiny bikinis
in communal changing rooms.
Maybe Cherie will now use
her influence over our new
Prime Minister,
who will order all clothes shops
to start producing clothes
that will fit attractively
over everyone's arses.
As an advocate in court,
you wear your wig and gown,
but it's what you say that matters,
not what you look like.
Suddenly, I then get thrust
into a position
where everything was about
how I looked.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
We won and we'd been up all night
and then that next morning,
he'd gone off to
start talking about important things
like, you know, forming the Cabinet,
and suddenly, the doorbell rings.
And I wasn't thinking,
just came out in my nightie,
and as I opened the door and I saw
the world's press outside,
I thought, "Oh, my God,
Tony will kill me for this,"
and I quickly shut the door again.
The funny thing is, as the spouse
of the Prime Minister,
yes, in some ways,
I was breaking with convention
because the assumption of the system
was that, obviously,
I would stop working.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Back in the '90s, we still
were not getting women CEOs,
women in the Cabinet.
It was still very much
a man's world.
Still is, really.
And I think that that's
what Bridget also finds,
that you have to fit in
with a male workplace
that doesn't really, at its heart,
take women seriously,
or think that they should be there.
So this is Primrose Hill,
this is what my life was
when I was writing Bridget.
And this is my old flat,
where I lived for about eight years.
And, yeah, I wrote Bridget up there.
Look!
Er... it was a really sweet
little flat.
It was all sort of slopey ceilings.
Not at all fancy.
I had a little office at the back
where I wrote,
and I remember laying out
all the columns on the carpet
and trying to stick them all
together in the right order
for the book.
I certainly remember when Helen got
the book deal, thinking, "Oh, that's nice,"
and the launch party being
quite small.
There wasn't a feeling that,
"This is the next big thing."
It was always like, "Oh, that's nice
for Helen, that's happening."
I didn't really have a plot,
but it was the time when the BBC's
Pride and Prejudice was showing
and everyone, including me,
was in love with Mr Darcy.
And I started writing the column
along the lines of the plot
of Pride and Prejudice.
'Cos I've never been that
great at plots
and I think that Pride And Prejudice
is the perfect novel.
And it'd been very well market-researched
over a number of centuries
and I thought Jane Austen wouldn't
mind. And anyway, she's dead.
Mr Darcy!
I couldn't really understand quite
why I was Darcy the first time.
I was bombarded with people
begging me not to play the part
because they were all in love
with Mr Darcy
and I just... I didn't fit.
They thought,
"You'll... you'll spoil it for ever."
Excuse me.
It was very odd, then, to be rooted
in the character in people's minds.
I just thought, "Join in the fun.
Get in on the joke.
If you're not laughing with them,
you might actually just be
a distant part of the joke anyway."
"It struck me as pretty
ridiculous to be called Mr Darcy
and to be standing on your own,
looking snooty at a party.
It's like being called Heathcliff
and insisting on spending the entire
evening in the garden,
shouting "Cathy" and banging
your head against a tree."
I should have done this years ago.
Done what? This.
Oof! Oh!
I barely ever worked with Hugh,
funnily enough.
All we've ever done is beat the shit
out of each other.
What the fuck do you think
you're doing?! This.
SHOCKED GASPS
We were discussing how we might
choreograph this very manly fight,
and it just occurred to us,
"How would we fight like that?"
I think it was me. I'm taking
credit. I rather bravely said,
"These are two middle-class men.
It would just be crap."
THEY GRUNT AND SHRIEK
It's quite difficult because they
get worried about health and safety
and they think, "Oh, you have to
have a stunt coordinator there."
And I think there was one there
on the day,
itching to come and improve it.
But we found the worse it was,
the better it was.
DARCY GRUNTS
Oh, God, I'm sorry!
I really am sorry!
I... I will pay. Had enough, Darcy?
It ended up being a masterstroke,
I think,
in a comedy, because cowardice...
..can be very, very funny,
particularly cowardice
and anger combined.
It's raining men, hallelujah
It's raining men...
THEY GRUNT AND GROAN
These are the galleys,
so you sort of hand it in
and then someone goes through with
a pen and marks all your mistakes.
"Wise people will say Daniel
should like me just as I am,
but I'm a child of Cosmopolitan
culture,
have been TRAUMETIZED..." -
spelt wrong - "..by supermodels
and too many quizzes. I am going to
cancel and spend the evening
eating doughnuts in
a cardigan with egg on it."
I don't think it even got
on the bestseller list.
But then when
the paperback came out,
there was this really exciting thing
that it went into the number six
spot of the Sunday Times
and then the next week, five,
four, three, two, one.
And then it just stayed there
and I was so excited
and I used to cut out the clipping,
but I stuck it inside
the lid of a box
because I didn't want to put it
on the wall or anything
if people came round, but I wanted
to lift the lid when I was on my own
and then it just stayed
at number one
and no-one could really
understand it.
I kind of was a bit surprised by it!
More fool me.
Because I kind of rather
thought of Helen as being
sort of attractively scatty.
And of course, what I didn't see
was the steel.
People think that Bridget's
a bit of a fool sometimes,
but she's no fool,
Bridget, as a character,
and Helen's no fool either.
I remember getting a train
out of Waterloo at rush hour
and every single woman on that train
was reading Bridget Jones's Diary,
and I thought, "She's done it."
To the publishing world's surprise,
Bridget became a word-of-mouth hit,
selling a staggering million copies.
Bridget was in the news...
Bridget Jones, a woman who has given
voice to a generation of women.
Bridget Jones's Diary has spent
25 weeks on the bestseller list.
Perhaps it means it's not
just Bridget in the modern world
who has a permanent sense
that she's not quite good enough.
..in comedy sketches...
Oh, Bridget Jones! Bridget Jones!
Bridget Jones, Bridget Jones...
..even started
a national conversation.
What we haven't managed to achieve
is to work out how we can possibly
work, have a great career,
have a family... We are. Yeah.
..and we're mopping up the sort
of mess... Oh, absolutely.
..that the original feminists
left behind.
But not everyone was a Bridget fan.
Fucking pink.
When Bridget first came out,
there were several quite serious
intellectual feminists
who were absolutely furious
and I could sort of see their point,
as I had at one point
written the line,
"There is nothing so unattractive
to a man as strident feminism,"
which was a multi-layered
ironic joke.
But I knew it
was going to annoy people.
I cannot believe I convinced myself
I was keeping
the entire weekend free to work
when in fact I was on
permanent date-with-Daniel standby.
Wasted two days glaring
psychopathically at the phone
and eating things.
I don't think
it's liberating at all, really.
One of the things
you're meant to believe is that
Bridget unlocks
the key to his heart.
Well, I'm buggered if
I know how she did it,
because she's been
nothing but a nuisance.
To Mark and his Natasha.
ALL: To Mark and his Natasha!
No. No!
What she's really looking for
is to be part of a couple.
Bridge, this is Hugo and Jane.
Hi. Hello. And obviously you know
Cosmo and Woney.BOTH: Hi, Bridge!
Universal coupledom buries all.
All those grisly parties
with all the spouses sitting around
saying she should
start a baby and all... Eugh!
You really ought to hurry up and
get sprogged up, you know, old girl.
Time's running out. Tick-tock.
The great moment is where
Mark Darcy is bending down
from his great height...
I'll be right with you.
And she ducks out
from under to change her pants.
And there she is, sort of
pulling out
her satin zebra-striped
knickers to put on.
In order to have a kiss,
you have to change your pants.
And they call that
glamorising, do they?
Jesus Christ.
I mean, he's going to
kiss you, girl.
You want him to kiss you?
My advice is kiss him back.
Don't worry about your pants.
In 2016, Woman's Hour
controversially included Bridget
in a list of the seven
most influential women
of the past seven decades.
Ayesha Hazarika was on the panel.
There's quite a lot of people
that were dead against it
and said this was outrageous and
this was, like, morally repugnant
and we should be all
kicked out of the sisterhood.
It's a deeply feminist thing to do,
to write a book that centres a woman
and her neuroses and
her genuine life experience.
I didn't feel the need for,
you know, Bridget to be
on marches all the time.
I don't want to call her
anti-feminist in any way,
because I don't think that she's...
I think she's someone who...
Does she know what she wants?
I actually don't know.
I don't know if she does.
Does she know what she wants?No.
I think she's just
sort of going through it.
I think she's a Gemini. I was
trying to figure that out today.
Have you ever felt
like Bridget Jones?
Definitely.
I mean, the time
when you feel like Bridget Jones
is when he doesn't call.
I think most women would think,
if they were totting up their life
statistics, would think
they'd spent too much time
waiting for calls that never came.
Bridget Jones had tapped
into something
that resonated globally.
The books went on to be
published in 40 countries,
selling 15 million copies.
There's me in Vogue.
I was so frightened and constantly
trying to hold my stomach in.
They put me in this pink dress
and then the photographer said...
FRENCH ACCENT: "Take her out of it.
She looks like a sausage."
I spent about two years,
really, on the road,
so it was quite lonely sometimes
and always ending up,
you know, in a hotel,
eating the M&Ms in the minibar.
But what a life, you know?
Essentially, it's been
the most fantastic thing
that could happen to
any writer, really,
unless you wanted to be
a very serious literary novelist,
which, of course, I do. And
I firmly believe there's still time.
Here she is.
In the years since, Helen found love
and had two kids, Dash and Romy.
I know. Who put it there?
And she's still having
the odd Bridget moment.
One time she had prepared us some
beef stew, it was very fancy looking
and it smelled amazing,
until I bit into a teabag.
I remember one time she managed
to set the pasta on fire
while she was cooking it.
But, really,
when it comes to a family,
all you want to do is have fun.
And I think that is something
that our mum does very well.
She's very good at entertaining us.
So I would say that she is pretty
close to being the perfect mother.
If the concept of Bridget
is supportive to the value
of being who you are,
being human, being kind,
being vulnerable,
honest, supportive to your friends,
and being able to laugh at yourself
and see the world through
a humorous perspective,
then that's... that's pretty good.
I think it's about just
being the person that you are,
even if it is scatty or silly
or someone who slides down
a fireman's pole
and shows her knickers to the nation
because the stuff happens, you know?
Definitely, I'd say a role model,
particularly in this day and age.
I think to admit fault
and have a laugh at how far you fall
is lovely and soothing.
I think what it boils down to
in the end is... is self-acceptance.
I think it's appreciating
that being imperfect is
what you're supposed to be.
We're not going to get it right
and that's perfectly fine.
OK. Good. I think we've said it all,
really, now, haven't we?
I never want to hear
another word about the woman.
LAUGHTER
Bitch.
If you smile at the sun
The sun will smile at you
If you laugh at the rain
Your rainbow will come through
Keep looking for those bluebirds
And bluebirds you will find
There really are no skies of grey
They're only in your mind
If you plant daffodils
then daffodils will grow...