Bridget Jones has faced many claims over the years: anti-feminist, anti-nice-guys, flaky, promiscuous, neurotic, fat, thin, clumsy, awkward, smoker, drinker, drama queen. But she is, improbably for a character played by a full-blooded Texan, irrepressibly, unashamedly, quintessentially, beautifully British. She is in so many respects what we recognise, what we are, what we sometimes don’t want to be and sometimes just what we do want to be.
So the news that Bridget, our Bridget, was filmed buying a copy of The Big Issue from a vendor outside of her flat in Borough, South London – which presumably she would then add to the stockpile creaking and tilting by her couch, collected over years – didn’t surprise us at all. It was, in fact, a stroke of genius by filmmakers for…