I’m so thankful binge-drinking, chain-smoking Bridget Jones was my Noughties role model growing up

Bridget Jones would risk ‘death by chardonnay’ in real life”, read one somewhat hysterical headline upon the release of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth film in the popular franchise based on Helen Fielding’s series of books.

This latest instalment, which sees Renée Zellweger return once more as everyone’s favourite frazzled yet loveable lead, proved that the eponymous heroine has something quite the opposite of what that po-faced headline might suggest: longevity. It’s now been almost 25 years since she first hit our screens in 2001, and the new film has recorded the highest-ever opening for a romcom in the UK. Bridget fever is clearly doing anything but diminishing as the decades roll by.

I can, technically, understand the “death by chardonnay” concerns after Dan Baumgardt, a senior lecturer in physiology, pharmacology and neuroscience at the University of Bristol, totted up Jones’s annual intake. The first book in the Fielding-penned quartet states that Jones ingested 3,836 units of alcohol, smoked 5,277 cigarettes and consumed 11 million calories in one year, equating to an alarming 74 units of alcohol a week (more than five times the recommended maximum), a 15-a-day ciggie habit, and more than 30,000 calories per day – “six to 10 times more than most competing bodybuilders”, as Baumgardt pointed out in an article published by The Conversation. Which, given Jones’s perfectly healthy BMI, seems nigh-on impossible. (I guess we can just chalk that one up to creative licence.)

In Bridget Jones 4, she has wisely curbed some of these habits, having swapped a packet a day for nicotine patches and binge-drinking for a scaled-back night of cocktails. But honestly, the more I think about it, the more I’m glad Bridget Jones was our hedonistic Noughties pin-up girl. Yes, her chaotic lifestyle was clearly unsustainable – so much so that Fielding’s publishers had to put a health warning on the books – but here was a woman who knew how to cut loose, truly enjoy herself (if sometimes to excess), and live her life with an uninhibited, reckless abandon. She provided a template of “grown-up” life that looked genuinely enticing to a moody teenager with braces, glasses and uncontrollable hair; occasionally falling out of cabs, making your friends eat blue soup or exposing your arse on national telly seemed a small price to pay for the joyful abundance, no-holds-barred fun and wine-fuelled escapades that Jones and her urban family represented.

In fact, it was the one blueprint for life that suggested being an adult was not about suddenly morphing into a serious and exhaustingly “perfect” woman who’d stepped straight out of a catalogue: skeletally thin, immaculately dressed, poised, never pissed, loud or crass, always witty and well informed. That it could be about continuing to make mistakes, learn from them, keep going and keep growing.

You didn’t have to have your s*** together in order to find a relationship, build a successful career and be a good daughter, friend or – in the case of Mad About the Boy – mother. There was no need to put your dreams on hold indefinitely until you’d got it all “right”. The imperfectly authentic version of you could continue stumbling forward and finding her footing – and having an enviably good time featuring unlimited bottles of white wine, M&S mini pizzas and party-size tiramisus in the process.

It’s hard not to contrast the fictional Jones with her real-life, modern-day equivalents when thinking of today’s poster girls for young women. It’s a world in which health and wellness are akin to a religion, and puritanical influencers with poreless foreheads and curated-to-the-hilt content featuring raw foods are often the aspirational role models for the next generation. No, there’s nothing wrong with prioritising your health. But these unattainable idols feel like they go hand in hand with a social media culture that breeds timidity and uptight control, in which everybody is terrified of making a single mistake for fear it’ll be recorded and forever documented online. Worst still, if you do f***-up publicly, it’s become seemingly mandatory to turn it into some sort of transformational content, à la How to Fail’s Elizabeth Day – or an overly earnest and tearful POV video about how you’ve been “humbled” and “will learn and heal from this experience going forward”.

One of the charms of Jones is her frequent and unapologetic embarrassment. The series charts a never-ending litany of compromising situations, from singing ear-shatteringly bad karaoke at the work Christmas party, to falling face-first into a sea of mud while dressed in head-to-toe white, to, in her latest outing, having a severe allergic reaction to a plumping lip treatment. There is real freedom in watching a woman who never loses the ability to laugh at herself and see the funny side, who never lets shame or fear hold her back, who refuses to say sorry for the crime of simply being human. It’s why she can believably have a red-hot summer fling with a man 20 years her junior (a perfectly cast Leo Woodall as Roxster) – here is a fiftysomething who, though she might have all the usual hangups about her body image and ageing, would never dream of letting them impact on her unadulterated enjoyment of sex.

Jones is susceptible to embarrassing set-ups because she takes risks, tries new things, says yes to life. And the truly inspirational thing about embarrassment? It engenders fearlessness. After all, if you’re not afraid to make a total tit of yourself at any given moment, what else could possibly scare you? That’s why Bridget Jones will always be my OG role model. While DBC (Death by Chardonnay) is clearly best avoided, spending our one wild and precious life pursuing joy over perfection seems a more worthwhile endeavour than ever.