LIZ JONES: I'm a sad, insecure singleton - and it's all Bridget's fault 

I won’t pretend to be friends with Helen Fielding, though we once worked together, and I have a handwritten postcard thanking me for a rave review. But I’m the closest it’s possible to be to her alter ego, Bridget Jones.

It was the 20th anniversary of the publication of Bridget Jones’s Diary on Thursday, and I suddenly realised I’ve been writing about B, and therefore about me, for two decades.

My career as a columnist was entirely her fault. My newspaper wanted a hit column about an inept singleton, and as my surname and disastrous luck with men matched hers, I was the obvious choice.

It was the 20th anniversary of the publication of Bridget Jones’s Diary on Thursday, and I suddenly realised I’ve been writing about B, and therefore about me, for two decades

But it wasn’t just the name that meant we chimed: in order to understand Bridget you had to be plagued with self-doubt, endlessly honing and harvesting your body, inhabit a squalid flat when you dreamed of a mansion, never getting the clothes or the conversation right, and being endlessly cheated on by men with someone younger and with a smaller waist and infinitely narrower IQ.

What you could not be was confident, lucky in love, successful, and comfortable in your own skin. And what you could most definitely not be was a mum, which was why Fielding’s third instalment failed, and why I’m dreading the release of the new film next month, Bridget Jones’s Baby, where our heroine is improbably still in her 40s, and considering buying an even bigger pair of pants.

Like Bridget, I sprang, in the late 1950s, from parents who armed me with nothing more than new potatoes, runner beans and a Debenhams voucher in preparation for being shoved off the three-piece suite and out into a cut-throat world where boyfriends weren’t remotely like our dads – loyal and handy.

And in the workplace, other women would slit our throats rather than help, while our vastly less talented male colleagues would be the only ones able to afford mansions. Oh, unless we married them and had their dreadful sprogs.

In the new film I would much rather see B mining the menopause and getting her ovaries done while negotiating prams in the doorway of new vegan hot spot Farmacy in Notting Hill than for her to smugly be mit bebe, with a valid excuse to be fat. B used to be one of us (the unloved, the useless), but now it seems she is firmly one of them.

My career as a columnist was entirely her fault. My newspaper wanted a hit column about an inept singleton, and as my surname and disastrous luck with men matched hers, I was the obvious choice

And it all becomes more problematic when Hollywood stars get involved, eager to bathe in the love their character emotes, but not quite so keen to inhabit their neuroses and knickers.

In among the millions of words I’ve written about B over the years is this: ‘Unlike me, Bridget will never, ever have a facelift, or filler. She is just too plump to ever have to worry about her face, too bolshie, too British.’

Last week, prompted by speculation that she’s had work done, Renee Zellweger, who plays B on-screen, wrote in an open letter: ‘I am writing because repetition of humiliating tabloid stories, mean-spirited judgments and false information… takes air time away from the countless significant, unprecedented current events affecting our world.’

All very Angelina Jolie, but if that’s how she feels, why did she go on a drastic diet after the first Bridget film wrapped, becoming so tiny that the clothes I’d taken to LA for her to wear in a magazine cover shoot were several sizes too big? (She was the only star I ever airbrushed to make her look bigger.) Why did it matter so much to be small that she had to rush back to her Hollywood self, even before she had completed promoting the film?

Zellweger could have embraced all that is Bridget just that little bit longer: plumptious, imperfect, hopelessly ill-prepared and always late.

Zellweger could have embraced all that is Bridget just that little bit longer: plumptious, imperfect, hopelessly ill-prepared and always late

Instead, like a caterpillar casting off a chrysalis, she shed our beloved B, thinking the whole premise (a woman who is more beautiful than a supermodel because she’s funny, kind and self-deprecating) unimportant.

This is the problem with shiny, successful types: they know angst is important in art, they just don’t want it sitting next to them at the marble kitchen island. They will have a dust bath in bathos because it makes them look good, but as soon as your back is turned they will rush off to the rain shower, soaping themselves on the back, glad they are not like Bridget at all.

So, all you happy and unhappy smug marrieds, bugger off! Why do you need B when you have a man in your bed and small chubby hands to hold? For me, the books (and the first two films) have been a rubber ring to cling to when life has become squally, and when there are no messages, not even from my mother. When all is Dooooom!, and the only thing to look forward to is that well-thumbed paperback with the photo of a woman with a glass and a fag on the cover, a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.