Helen Fielding has lost her touch

To understand quite how disgruntled the reviews of the latest Bridget Jones diaries have been, you have to recall quite what she meant to her readers first time round. It wasn’t just the way she seemed to sum up the female condition for unmarried women in their thirties — indeed, she put a name on it, the singleton — who were torn between theoretical commitment to feminism and a creeping dread of never settling down and dying alone and getting eaten by Alsatians.

It was her eye for the insecurities in which women specialise — the calorie and weight counting, the weakness for self-help books — and the girl-bonding in bars. So when the reviewers pronounced that Mad About the Boy was — is,— a right little turkey, it was with the air of women renouncing an old friend, a bit of their former selves. Indeed, one Guardian writer went to the trouble of reminding us that, you know, people, Bridget doesn’t actually exist.

A turkey it is, though, with enough of the sharp eye of the old Helen Fielding to remind us of why we liked her the first time round. On the bright side, Bridget has beaten the body clock (‘Tick-tock!’) and produced, like her creator, two sweet children in her mid-forties. On the downside, Mark Darcy is dead, and her friends have decided, not to put too fine a point on it, that after four years of blameless widowhood she must get laid.

Which she does, landing an inordinately desirable toyboy called Roxster on Twitter. But you know, getting older in your fifties isn’t quite as funny as getting older in your thirties; widowhood isn’t as funny as being single first time round, and the angst of ageing isn’t really funny at all.