Bridget Jonesing

First came mad cow disease, then the hoof-and-mouth epidemic. Now the UK is in the grip of another heifer-related scourge?Bridget Jones mania.

For the past month the British media has been gearing up for the release of the film and, now that it's arrived, the entire female population of Britain has gone crazy about Helen Fielding's overweight alter ego. My fiancee dragged me along to it last week and afterward said she wanted to see it again?immediately! The Evening Standard has even started running daily extracts from the "film tie-in edition" of Bridget Jones's Diary. What began as a newspaper column has been turned into a movie that has spawned a book that has become a?newspaper column. Talk about recycling! By my estimation, Fielding will never have to work again.

It's fair to say that the reaction to Fielding's success on Fleet Street, particularly among her female colleagues, has been mixed?a mixture of envy and disbelief. As Gore Vidal said, "Every time a friend succeeds, a little part of me dies." Indeed, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' description of the different emotions a person goes through on learning that they're dying accurately captures Fleet Street's reaction to the Bridget Jones phenomenon: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, eventually, five years after the Diary first hit the UK bestseller lists, acceptance.

The denial first kicked in when the hardback edition of the book got into the UK bestseller list in the autumn of 1996. "Helen Fielding who writes that silly column in The Independent? Surely not?" The book's success became harder to dismiss when the paperback edition went straight in at number one the following summer and stayed there for the best part of a year. "Okay, okay, so Fielding's struck a chord with Britain's burgeoning population of 'sad singletons.' So fucking what? It's hardly great literature, just a successful exercise in niche marketing."

The "bargaining" stage consisted of all Fielding's female competitors deciding that they, too, could sell out in return for vast riches, and quickly knocking off pale imitations starring overweight sad sacks in their 30s. "Depression" followed when the vast majority of these books ended up sinking without a trace. Meanwhile, Fielding wrote a follow-up?Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason?that was almost as successful as the original.

The reason the British press has reluctantly come to terms with Fielding's triumph is because she's achieved success in America, the publishing equivalent of winning an Olympic gold medal. So few British authors manage to pull this off that whenever one does we immediately stop carping and rally round?even if Fielding did start out as a bloody journalist. America now occupies the cultural position that Paris did in the 19th century: to paraphrase Balzac, unless an event has been noticed in America it hasn't really happened. When a British icon manages to cross the Atlantic, whether Harry Potter, Tom Jones or Bridget Jones, we feel a glow of patriotic pride. In terms of pop culture at least, we're still a global superpower.

In order to ease the transition from local heroine to international phenomenon, Bridget Jones had to be played by an American actress. The news that Renee Zellweger landed the role was greeted with uproar over here, completely counteracting the pride we felt on learning that the book was to be made into a Hollywood film. How could this glowing example of American pulchritude possibly play our "Bridge"? What was wrong with Kate Winslet, for heaven's sake? It was like casting Ben Affleck as James Bond.

However, now that we've actually seen Zellweger in the part, all is forgiven. First of all, there's her British accent. So many American actors do bad British accents?remember Marlon Brando in Mutiny on the Bounty??that whenever they get it right we completely fall in love with them?and Zellweger's accent is even better than Gwyneth Paltrow's in Sliding Doors.

Then there's the fact that she's a complete hefferlump. Even Paltrow wouldn't be prepared to put on 20 pounds and waddle around in a bunny costume just to get a laugh. Zellweger's the De Niro of romantic comedy! As far as we're concerned, she's gone that extra mile (in every direction) just to prove us wrong. It's almost as if she's saying to the skeptical Brits in the audience: "You don't think a hot American actress like me can play an overweight, thirtysomething English 'singleton'? Okay, buster, just you watch!"

I've actually dated girls like Bridget Jones and Zellweger is completely convincing in the role?or should that be rolls? Indeed, it's so unusual to see a Hollywood actress bulk up to this extent that when my fiancee asked me what I thought of Zellweger's performance as we were leaving the cinema last week, I unthinkingly expressed amazement that she'd put on so much weight.

"I mean, she was really fucking big," I said.

"You know, she only went up to a size 12," mused my fiancee, who'd just read a piece on Zellweger in a celebrity magazine. "I'm a size 12. If it had been me up there on that screen instead of her that's exactly what I'd look like."

"Er, yeah," I replied, a little too quickly, "but the camera adds at least 10 pounds."

I was reminded of a story that James Wolcott?whose forthcoming The Catsitters looks set to become the Bridget Jones's Diary for men?told me about taking a date to see Crimes and Misdemeanors. As they were leaving the movie theater she asked him what he'd thought of Daryl Hannah, who'd had a cameo in the film as a siren in a red dress. "She was looking hot," he replied without thinking.

"You thought she was 'hot'?" repeated his date, incredulously.

"I meant she looked hot, as if she were going to start sweating under those hot lights," he stammered. "In fact, she looked a little clammy." At this point the couple in front of them started giggling and his date made one of those faces that said: "Men!"