London - Twenty years after she first burst onto the scene in a pair of big pants and a tumbledown topknot, Bridget is back.
Yes, I’m afraid so.
The world’s most calamitous and dysfunctional singleton returns to the big screen in a film called Bridget Jones’s Baby later this year.
This is the third movie in the successful franchise and once more we find Renée Zellweger starring as hapless Bridget and Colin Firth as hopeless Mark Darcy; the star-crossed lovers whose dodo romance never quite takes flight.
And that’s the first problem right there. In the intervening years, she’s had the kind of intensive Hollywood beauty treatments –-ahem! ahem! - that makes her face look like a wax egg.
And Firth hasn’t.
Fifteen years on from when they first kissed in the snow, Zellweger boasts the luminous glow of the eternally young Hollywood glitter pixie, while Firth looks like the recently retired accountant on her second string tax team.
He is thinner, older and slightly battered by life - like a real person. The result of this physical disparity is that they no longer look like a feasible couple of lovebirds, but more like a father and daughter - or even a glamorous carer and her doddery charge. I know what you are thinking: everyday form for the industry romcom norm.
However, what is much, much more disturbing is that time has not withered Bridget’s infinite capacity to muck up her life.
Oh God, she is still an idiot, she has learned nothing. In Bridget years, the old girl must be in her mid-40s by now, but here she is, still as giddy as a lambkins in spring - and up the duff to boot.
The terrible truth was laid bare in film trailers released this week: author Helen Fielding’s comic creation wears a white outfit and falls - splat! - into a pool of mud at a rock festival.
She is infantilised and mocked by her colleagues at work, she still behaves like a teenager at her first disco when she goes out and, most damning of all, she doesn’t know which of her two boyfriends is the father of her child.
Bridget, a word. What is attractive and winsome in a young woman just begins to look tragic as you age.
A fantasy sequence appears to show Bridget as a bride, walking down the aisle in her full Grace Kelly finery.
Yet we quickly fade to the reality of her single life: Bridget is back on the sofa in her lonely flat, the usual bottle of wine on the table, her scented candles still burning from both ends.
She has even got a string of fairy lights tied up against a wall - the tragic bunting of the hopeful spinster everywhere.
A single birthday candle burns on a cupcake as All By Myself plays in the background.
No, no, no. It simply won’t do.
Particularly as so many women around the world are emotionally invested in Bridget Jones.
We love Bridget, but we don’t want her to carry on forever like a desiccated Miranda, a kind of superannuated Mrs Bean who is an insult to our intelligence.
The first Diary and the film of the same name were witty and charming.
The second film, The Edge Of Reason, stretched credulity almost as much as the skin on Zellweger’s cheekbones.
And now we are faced with a Bridget who is older, but no wiser - a doe-eyed dolt still plagued by misadventure and farce. She is someone who is not in charge of her own destiny, a woman who has remained the same while the world has moved on. Like Peter Pan, she will never grow up.
And that is depressing. Bridget goes to spinning class, she drinks martinis, she is fossilised into one of the Frozen Egg Generation, who thinks everything is going to turn out fine. And we all know that it won’t.
Millions of women who followed the adventures of Bridget were a little bit like her.
However, out in the real world they had to grow up and put their childish things behind them; they had to adapt to survive.
As with each new Bridget adventure, she becomes a little more unrealistic and – dare I say it – unlikable.
Once upon a time we were rooting for Bridget to win the game of life - but not if she’s stuck in this rut forever.
Ask yourself this: would sexy, glowering Mark Darcy really still be attracted to a ditz like her?
Wouldn’t he want someone a bit smarter and more organised, with a nice haircut and colour, who has organised an Easter lunch and knew how to walk across a room without falling over? Someone a little bit like, well, me? Just a thought. A very, very good thought, at that.
Bridget Jones’s Baby opens in South African cinemas on September 16.
Daily Mail