Time to catch up

Renee Zellweger as disastrous Bridget Jones. Photo / Supplied

In the 1990s, when credit was cheap, house prices were rising and jobs easy to come by, a 33-year-old woman called Bridget Jones bumbled into our lives.

A modern-day Jane Austen character in tummy-control knickers, she was neurotic about the amount she smoked, drank and ate. Her main priority was to get a boyfriend. And in this quest she set feminism back four decades.

But there was something lovable and funny about her. Helen Fielding, her creator, is a sharp, social satirist and Bridget captured the zeitgeist.

She embodied a certain kind of youngish, ladetteish woman and we indulged her. Now she is set for a comeback.

There is a musical in the offing and Working Title announced last month that it was developing a third film, likely to be based on the weekly newspaper columns that Fielding wrote in 2005 when she reopened Bridget's diary after a six-year break.

In these later entries, Bridget and Mark Darcy, the lawyer with whom she finally got together at the end of the second book, The Edge of Reason, have broken up. They meet again and sleep together. She then runs into her former lover and arch-cad, Daniel Cleaver, and drunkenly sleeps with him. Bridget, now pushing 40, later finds she is pregnant with Daniel's baby.

So not much has changed for Bridget. She's still self-obsessing, tottering tipsily from crisis to crisis.

However, the world has moved on — and so has the Bridget Jones generation.

We are now in our late 30s and early 40s, many of us are married, perhaps juggling the demands of office life with raising children or looking after elderly parents. We worry about hanging on to our jobs, paying the mortgage, swine flu, the state of our schools and hospitals, global warming and so on. Yes, when we have the chance for a minute of self-reflection we may dream of losing a few kilos or wonder if we've exceeded the recommended weekly alcohol limit. But it's a fleeting thought.

Bridget had her own flat, a media job and enough money to frequent fashionable restaurants. Yet there she was crying into her chardonnay because she was single. What was amusing then would be infuriating and sad in a woman 10 years older. She is no longer relevant; we don't need her whining about men, as though a woman without a husband is incomplete, putting back the female cause another 10 years.

We should wave a fond goodbye to Bridget as she was at the end of the second film. We can imagine her moving to the suburbs to live forever in soft focus with the handsome, wealthy Darcy and their beautiful children.

A new fictional heroine is needed: a woman with backbone, to inspire us in a time of global recession.

She would be clever and witty, cultured and confident. She would enjoy fashion, flirting and parties, but these things wouldn't rule her life.

The name Bridget Jones moved into the pop-cultural lexicon. It was used as an adjective and a noun to described certain women and their behaviour at a particular age and in a particular era.

Now she and the chick lit/flick trend that she helped spawn have grown tired.

In one of her 2005 diary entries, Bridget wrote: "Am I going to be 80 and casting murderous glances at Daniel over dominoes in an old people's home, then having one-too-many cream sherries, tittering coquettishly and tumbling into bed with him?" I do hope not.