I didn’t mean to go to see a matinée performance of Mad About the Boy, the fourth instalment of the Bridget Jones film series.
It was a misunderstanding. My sister had come to stay and Mary, wanting to give her a treat, had booked three seats in our luxurious local cinema, weirdly assuming I would want to come too.
My sister needed a treat because, like me, she suffers from seasonal affective disorder – in her case, coupled with perennial rhinitis and assorted chesty conditions triggered by living near Didcot in the Thames ‘Basin’. The word Basin says it all.
She is always a welcome guest in the neighbouring county of Wiltshire, where she can breathe some downland air and receive tea and sympathy against a barrage of booming – not from bitterns, but from the big guns of the nearby Salisbury Plain military training area.
Mary usually instigates these visits as we both find my sister’s company to be relaxing – dread word, with its connotations with Classic FM; indeed relaxing to an almost medicinal degree.
Could this be because, during her professional training as a youth counsellor, she learned how to defuse tensions characteristic of troubled teenagers from ‘problem’ families?
It’s as though a switch has turned off my own high-blood-pressure-triggered, Colonel Blimp-style outbursts and Mary’s histrionic tantrums. A soothing conversational balm is metaphorically applied, almost as she walks through the cottage door.
As a Henrietta Kissinger figure, she could do well to extend her services: couples’ conflicting points of view seem to resolve themselves in her presence, thus bypassing the need for mediation or arbitration.
Yet who is to know whether our disputes are just par for the course for married couples, or whether they are the result of our living on top of a ‘negative ley line’?
A local dowser has declared that a hidden water source, running beneath our row of terraced cottages, is a source of bad energy. He said that quarrelling, breaking out at the least provocation, would inevitably characterise the lifestyles of all the occupants in the five cheek-by-jowl dwellings above it.
One of our daughters, a teacher, recently had a ringside seat at one of our spats. She observed, ‘Nought to ten in under five seconds? My six-year-olds have better self-control and emotional intelligence than you guys.’
But what does my daughter really know about emotional intelligence?
I have always maintained that Bridget Jones was a poor role model for daughters. Witness the plumping for serial rotters, the reliance on alcohol to drown sorrows or salve broken hearts and the singing along to banal pop anthems in lonely bedsits.
The Bridget Jones series was not aimed at our daughters’ generation – and neither was Friends. Yet every 20-to-30- something woman we know will happily watch both on repeat.
As the womenfolk headed for the car before the film, I told them what was what. ‘You’re all right, mate, as they say in common parlance. The deal is, I will drive you to the Parade Cinema and drop you off, so you don’t need to worry about parking. Then I’ll come back here and cook the chicken. And that will be a victory for common sense.’
‘No, darling!’ Mary said. ‘I’ve purchased the last three tickets. It’s a sell-out. It will be good for you to watch a feelgood film.’
Feelgood romcoms aren’t at all my cuppa. No special effects.
A billboard advertising the film in the cinema’s cocktail lounge confirmed my worst fears: ‘If you have a heart, you will adore this British movie.’ Well, that, in a nutshell, is my problem.
Richard Curtis’s ham-fisted gropes at my heartstrings have failed in the past, but maybe with a fresh director... I should keep an open mind. What I hadn’t reckoned on was being subjected to what felt like an AI-generated, formula-driven, cynically devised tear-jerker with one purpose in mind – to make money.
A clunky tear-jerker, at that – a series of tableaux and set pieces, designed to trigger a range of emotions. I haven’t felt so manipulated since standing in a line-up of small boys being medically inspected by Matron at my Denbighshire prep school on the Coed Coch estate, attendance at which has ensured I don’t have an emotional range.
As for Bridget Jones herself, what’s with the head-wobbling? Unless I missed her being appointed an unofficial ambassador for Parkinson’s, that head was wobbling more than Lady Penelope’s in Thunderbirds. And why was she walking like a penguin?
The film has two saving graces. One, it confirmed we were right to move to the sticks. At least we own a whole cottage.
Were we to have stayed in London, we couldn’t have afforded even a broom cupboard in Bridget’s ravishing but horribly cluttered fictional house on Hampstead Heath.
The second is, that, mercifully, there are no sightings of Leo Woodall’s buttocks. Leo plays Roxster, 29, the ‘boy’ about whom Bridget, 51, is mad.
We saw more than our fill of those buttocks in what Mary calls the ‘trampolining’ scenes of the second series of the (deeply enjoyable) White Lotus.
Verdict: it is a load of tosh. Yet I have to admit a cinema screen does concentrate the mind. You can’t multitask and it’s quite enjoyable to be hypnotised into silence, like a rabbit in headlights.
It would never happen at home.
