Have we really moved on since Bridget?

By Susanna Hislop

Watching “Bridget Jones’s Baby” is like going on a crash course in how far female comedy characters have come since Helen Fielding’s creation first appeared 21 years ago. She helped pave the way for the introspective comic heroine, but to modern audiences, the dappy, self-deprecating Bridget seems quaintly naïve.

Today’s funny girl is brash, unapologetic and sexually voracious. Next to Hannah Horvath, Lena Dunham’s character in “Girls”, or the eponymous heroine of “Fleabag”, a recent comedy series by British writer and actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the well-meaning 43-year-old looks sweetly out of touch. Watching Hannah show off her glorious, tattooed nakedness, or Fleabag give her desperately unhappy sister a “Burrower” vibrator as a birthday present (“it’s half price ’cos it’s relentless”) you realise gratefully how much the presentation of women has changed in mainstream culture. Unlike Bridget, these millennial singletons are neither loveable nor particularly ambitious. They don’t want to get married, they don’t really want jobs, they don’t smuggle their flesh into Spanx and they don’t need men – or the viewer – to like them.