I remember when Bridget Jones’s Diary first started running as a column in The Independent newspaper; it was done very straight at first, and it only gradually became apparent that it was a spoof. It was loosely based on the story of Pride and Prejudice, and came out at about the same time that the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle production was a big hit on the BBC. I remember reading a column in the paper which was purportedly a particularly disastrous interview between Bridget and Colin Firth, where she was completely star-struck, and he was struggling not to laugh at how ridiculous the interview was.
I really enjoyed that first run of columns, and also the first book, which was pretty much a straight adaptation of the newspaper articles. The first film was fun too, and I thought that Renee Zellweger did a remarkably good job of being Bridget. They obviously couldn’t have her interviewing Colin Firth in the film itself, since he was playing the hero, Mark Darcy. But in the extras on the DVD, there is a scene shot on-set, where Renee, still in character as Bridget, interviews Colin as himself. That was pretty funny.
I thought that the second book, and the second film, were less successful, though still quite fun. Bridget was even more cringe-making than before, but the tensions and fisticuffs between Mark Darcy and the cad Daniel Cleaver were quite amusing. The film and book ended with her finally getting together with Mark Darcy and apparently living Happily Ever After.
But now there is a third book out, and it’s been widely reviewed in the newspapers and leaked all over the Internet. Happily Ever After only lasted a few years – Bridget is now a widow after the author killed off Mark Darcy. There was quite a long excerpt from the book in the Sunday Times, which my mother put in the post to me. Reading that was quite enough for me. I really don’t need to read a whole book about what appeared from the extract to be quite a realistic description of bereavement and widowhood. Ok, unlike Bridget, I don’t have two small children, and am not hankering after a toy-boy. But there were enough similarities in our situation of premature widowhood to put me off the book entirely.
I shan’t be buying the book. And, if they do a film version of it, I don’t intend to watch it. It wouldn’t be the same without Colin Firth anyway…..
