She obsesses about her weight, smokes, drinks and is always late to work: Bridget Jones is no role model, writes LIBBY PURVES 

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She’s now 43 and a TV journalist but has become pregnant in the new film

Bridget’s back again! The new film finds her 12 years on from the last happy ending, having broken up with sober Mark Darcy and seen him marry someone else.

She’s now 43, getting on surprisingly well as a TV journalist, but is flaky enough to end up pregnant (a lucky strike given her age) and confused.

This happens after another fling with Darcy (despite him being married) and Bridget ends up clueless about whether he or another lover is the father of her surprise baby.

Of course the movie is a sure-fire hit for a girls’ night out, with Renee Zellweger rolling out the old goofy charm.

Those of us who read the latest novel about Bridget by her creator Helen Fielding (‘Mad About The Boy’) may be momentarily baffled because in that story she married Mark, he then died, and she was left widowed with two young children and plenty of money, pretending to write a screenplay based on Hedda Gabler without actually knowing who wrote the play (Hen rik Ibsen) or being able to spell it.

She spends most of that book cougar-ing around with a much-younger lad she meets on Twitter, before finding true love again.

But we’ll happily forget all that, and enjoy the completely different vision in this new film. For Bridget may break all rules: she’s a legend, a famous icon, a key totem for modern womanhood.

Patrick Dempsey, Renee Zellweger and Colin Firth pose for the screening of 'Bridget Jones's Baby' - the latest in the series in Paris

Except that she isn’t, not really. Instead, I would bravely affirm that the woman is a disastrous role model for modern women.

What Fielding has created, and entertained us with since 1995, is a joke, an absurd literary comic character.

Bridget was created at the request of an editor (male), who, it is said, wanted her to write a real diary — middle-aged men always love to think about sexy, young, single women-about-town.

But Fielding, very wisely, devised a fictional self instead: an exaggerated comedy figure.

Bridget is in a grand tradition of fictional fools: the equivalent of Mr Pooter in George and Weedon Grossmith’s 1892 novel Diary Of A Nobody, or P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, or the lads in Hollywood farce Dumb And Dumber.

She obsesses about her weight but eats at random, smokes, drinks heavily, is chronically late for work because she can’t decide which tights to wear, and can’t organise herself enough to cook a meal for friends.

Miss Jones, of course, is basically well-meaning and kindly inclined, says Libby Purves

She worships the troubled but glamorous Princess Di as a role model, votes Labour without the slightest understanding of economics or law — lazily announcing that being Left-wing ‘stands for sharing, kindness, gays, single mothers and Nelson Mandela’.

She is a sucker for self-help books but has no interest in serious reading, culture or current affairs: indeed, her high-flying journalist job in the new film seems wildly unlikely if you’ve read the original ‘Diaries’ novels, in which she can’t even catch a plane or string two sentences together when she gets a scoop interview.

Above all, Bridget defines herself entirely by her ability to get a man: one not only attractive and free from white socks and novelty sweaters, but rich enough to take her on ritzy mini-breaks and eventually turn her into a ‘Smug Married’.

Perhaps it is no accident that she first roamed the land in the years when the Duchess of York was in her racketiest phase. Remember her? The dim, jolly Fergie who hung out in ski resorts, married a prince, messed it up, took up with dodgy men, got caught, and was for ever trying to lose weight. Pure Bridget.

But Miss Jones, of course, is basically well-meaning and kindly inclined. She puts up with being dismissively treated and patronised by her men. Indeed, in this way, she’s rather an old-fashioned figure from the days when chaps said ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever’.

The makers of the newest Bridget Jones film are hoping to capitalise on the previous success of the series 

The biggest irony in the original 1996 book is that author Helen Fielding borrows the outline of Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice, in which Elizabeth Bennet at first thinks Mr Darcy is a snotty stand-off, but comes to love him.

The joke here is that Bridget is nothing at all like Elizabeth Bennet, the intelligent, witty, restrained and cultured elder sister. Instead, she is a dead ringer for Lydia Bennet, Elizabeth’s youngest sister who’s only interested in dressing up, chasing soldiers and ends up needing to be rescued by Darcy’s money.

Yet while we laugh happily at our modern Bridget’s pratfalls and misunderstandings — it’s a comedy after all — at the same time we keep hearing or reading about women who identify with her, who say: ‘I am Bridget!’

These women celebrate the idea of getting well into your 30s while still able to think only about chaps, chardonnay and calories. But consider this, you never hear men saying: ‘I am Bertie Wooster! Mr Pooter! Oooh, I do identify with that thick Jim Carrey character in Dumb And Dumber!’ They just laugh at these fictional characters and move back to real life.

But you do hear grown-up women, some approaching 50, boasting of being Bridget Joneses. Even though, frankly, very few of them are.

Women have to earn respect these days, using brains and judgment whether at work or deep in family responsibilities.

Bridget Jones in the original film 'Bridget Jones Diary' which was released in 2001 

Love is important, but past the age of 25 not many sane women read multiple self-help books like credulous Bridget and her friends. And once past 30, most of us are pretty good at identifying a smarmy cheat. Even if he does look like Hugh Grant (in his heyday).

The problem is that identifying with Bridget is just another insidious example of female self-deprecation, a sense that it’s wrong to value yourself and be assertive about things that you know — whether in the workplace, or running a family home and looking after a community.

Claiming to be Bridget is clinging to a reassuring sense that everything will be all right if you’re basically nice and unthreatening.

The cosy legend is that however stupidly you behave, however much money and time you waste; however drunk, nicotine-stained, obsessed with your appearance and pointlessly lovesick you are, it’s all OK. Because you’re a lovable person underneath.

Bridget married Mark Darcy in the second film - 'The Edge of Reason'

It is a very British idea, as comforting as hot cocoa and a slice of cake.

Compare the Jones legend with an American film such as Legally Blonde in which the ditzy heroine, crossed in love, doesn’t lie around sobbing drunkenly on her friends and scoffing mini Swiss-rolls.

She rolls up her sleeves and works day and night at her books, often on an exercise bike, to become a Harvard-educated lawyer.

We British love the comedy of personal hopelessness: the idea of a likeable twit who gets away with it.

But men don’t think Bertie Wooster is a role model, and women who take Bridget Jones as one are frankly getting it wrong.

W e all have an occasional Bridget-moment — wrong clothes, horror at having just eaten too much, dating a disastrous man — but to have more than one or two a week would be disastrous. It would also be very unusual.

Everybody is entitled to behave like a twit in their teens, and perhaps for a while at university, but such immature behaviour generally peters out afterwards.

Look around you at the Bridget generation — any age between 30 and 50 — and from school-gates to reception desks to boardrooms you will see competent, busy, responsible women juggling complicated lives, doing their hair and make-up in a hurry or not at all.

They probably have a few secret romantic sorrows but are realists, nursing ambitions and hopes for something more than just a chance to collapse on a broad manly bosom and have someone pat them and say: ‘There, there, you pretty little darling, don’t worry.’

No, the truth is, the Bridgets are dinosaurs now.

For real women today, the determined new TV Queen Victoria is more likely to be their heroine than poor lost Princess Diana.

In pop culture, they watched the decline of the brilliant, hard-drinking, disastrously lovelorn Amy Winehouse and saw that it’s better in the long run to be a beadily well-organised Taylor Swift or a cheerfully chubby Adele.

So they say to their daughters, as they head off together for a riotous night at the movies: ‘Enjoy Bridget. Just don’t BE her.’

Sarah Vine is away