Come the fuck on, Bridget

I made a podcast about the OG hot mess and inter-generational icon, Bridget Jones

Forgive the break in regular programming (Bits will be back next week!) but I wanted to tell you a little bit about a new podcast which you should listen to immediately. For the past 4 months I’ve been working on a five-part series with Sony for Universal Pictures and Working Title Films all about the one and only Bridget Jones. It’s been 25 years since the first film came out and 30 years since the writer Helen Fielding created Bridget Jones for a column in The Independent.

In the three decades since, Bridget has been discussed possibly more than any other character of contemporary literature — as contested as she is championed — and claimed as an icon for Gen X, millennials, and now Gen Z. Her impact on women’s fiction cannot be under-estimated: she completely changed the fiction market. Jojo Moyes, who has almost 40 million books, once said that it was the publication of Bridget Jones that galvanized her into writing her own books. It’s almost like fiction can be divided neatly in two: BBJ and ABJ. (Bobby and I spoke a little bit about this in an episode of Book Chat on Bridget Jones’s Diary.)

But you don’t have to have read the books to love the films, which have always been so ineffably charming to me, with an extraordinarily high hit rate of one-liners. Rarely a day goes by when my husband and I do not quote any of the following: Chechnyaaa; the F.R. Leavis?; mind the overspray; what a riveting life you do lead; I’ll just switch this on; yes, yes it was me, no plans to record anything else; honk honk; there was a young lady from Ealing. I could go on. And on. And on..

Next week, a fourth movie, Mad About The Boy, comes out in the UK. Bridget is in her early fifties, she has two young kids — and she’s a widow. In the words of Bridget herself: “life has its light notes, and life has its dark notes”. Yes, it hits you right in the heart guts. Bring tissues — you will honk sob. But, four years on from Mark Darcy’s death (with Daniel Cleaver miraculously alive again) and Bridget is dating — at one point she ends a flirty text with the duck, abacus and greek flag emojis — which means you will honk lol, too. (When Daniel babysits, he brushes Bridget’s daughter Mabel’s hair with a fork, and teaches her son, Billy, who he calls “Miniature Darcy”, how to make a dirty bitch martini.) Bonus points if you spot Sienna Miller’s baby daddy in a small role (Thandiwe Newton’s daughter, Chloe, plays Bridget’s adorable nanny.)

The podcast was a riot to make, recording in New York and London, with a gazillion moving parts. There’s a pod trailer which I don’t have the tech knowledge to embed, but you can watch it here. I got to speak to the heavenly Renée Zellwegger (surely the best bit of casting ever, it’s hard to imagine that back in 2000, there was a furore when a Texan not a Brit was cast; I’ve also never — ever — heard people speak more glowingly of an actor they’ve worked with; she’s literally twinkles with genuine Texan charm), her new love interests Leo Woodall and Chiwetel Ejiofor (the fruits of her ‘magical man tree’) and the woman responsible for it all, Helen Fielding — who reveals that a) so much of Bridget’s life is based on anecdotes from her own life (the blue soup, the blusher at the law society dinner) and b) that Hugh Grant ad libs a lot of his own lines, including the inimitable — the eternal — ‘Hello, Mummy’.

I spoke with screenwriters Abi Morgan (who also wrote my fave BBC drama, The Split, which returned for a hot minute over Christmas and the critically acclaimed memoir, This Is Not A Pity Memoir) and Dan Mazer (who co-created Borat, Brunö and Ali G) who talked about finding the humour in the grief and complimenting one another’s writing; director Michael Morris (who directed Brothers & Sisters and Better Call Saul, this was his first rom-com); music supervisor Nick Angel (he’s been across all four films — the needle drops he’s responsible for!); and costume designer Molly Emma Rowe (on where she found those big pants and the lengths she went to to re-create Bridget’s penguin pyjamas).

I also chatted to Bridget’s OG friends (James Callis, Sally Phillips — who was very, very funny, and also surprisingly moving about how her life has turned out to be rather harder than Shazza’s) and her new posse (Josette Simon, Leila Farzad, Sarah Solemani). Plus, I debrief with my fellow Bridget super-fans, novelists Candice Carty-Williams (who says she wrote her best-selling debut, Queenie “a Black Bridget Jones”) and Sentimental Garbage’s Caroline O’Donoghue.

Episode 1: Mad About Bridget (on the cultural legacy of Bridget Jones, with Helen, Candice and Caroline) and Episode 2: Mad About The Movies (on the four movies, with Abi, Dan and Sally) have dropped so far, with a further three on the men (!!), the mates and playing Bridget, coming next week. I so hope you enjoy it — and the film, too, when it drops next week. Remember, tissues. You have been warned. Oh and don’t worry about spoilers, despite my ardent love for a spoiler, we haven’t given anything away.