Bridget Jones's Diary

Listen.

Bridget Jones' diary.

Okay, quote.

New Year's resolution.

Good news story.

Helen Fielding, who is the author of Bridget Jones's Diary, has just launched the Bridget Jones Prize for Northern Comedy Writing Award.

Oh, that's amazing.

Yeah.

They're just a funding partner, I think.

And then the runner-up will get a thousand pounds.

And the way to enter the competition is so you have to let me find it here i'm just on the guardian did an article about it the bridget jones prize for northern comedy writing will go to the funniest self-contained first person prose of 1000 words the format echoes the anonymous diary columns in the independent that first brought bridget to readers in the 1990s

wow

This time of the week, after the actual news, we like to talk about news that wasn't in the news, that could, would or should have been in the news, if the news were designed to make you feel better, which it's not.

Honourable mention to, I was going to talk about the very brave Helen Fielding, of course, author of Bridget Jones, who has launched a new prize to encourage writers of funny diaries from the north of England to get in touch.

And I would just say, having released my diary, she needs to be careful because she might not get the gag rate she's looking for.

Do you know what I mean? Are you

saying it's too late for you to enter and you're bitter? My entry is out there.

Is that it? If she thinks that The Diaries of John Richardson could become the new Bridget Jones, who am I to stop her? But as we know, I hold on to my pants a lot longer than Bridget did.

Whatever size.

I'm going to talk about this one because sometimes it's just nice to realise that you can't have nice things...

Just make this book go away.

Besides, I much preferred Bridget Jones' Diary.

Oh, scathing, scathing.

It was terrible.

But also today, the author Helen Fielding will be here.

Can you believe the novel Bridget Jones was written some 30 years ago? Doesn't time fly? Well, Helen is launching and funding the Bridget Jones Writing Prize, and she's looking for northern stars, so to speak.

We'll talk to her about that.

We also have rugby superstars on the program this morning, Maggie Alphonsi and Ruby Tui.

Right.

Let me move on to the very quiet guest who crept into the studio while I was speaking to Alex.

That is the author Helen Fielding, best known for creating the beloved character of Bridget Jones, who is now featured in four films.

Yes, I did sit down to watch one of them again last night.

They queue for Chawton.

They've given us Clueless and Bridget Jones and Mr. Darcy fighting zombies.

Mark Twain hated her so passionately he wanted to dig her up, and lost comprehensively to his own countrymen.

My guest today has spent her career studying exactly this phenomenon.

The article explicitly highlights a 1974 hardcover book club edition of Carrie with the dust jacket valuing it at $100.

We also have Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet with a signed first printing noted at $300, and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, specifically a signed first American edition bundled with the first edition of its sequel, The Edge of Reason, fetching $500.

Three profoundly different types of books, yet they all hold significant secondary market value for entirely different, deeply psychological reasons.

Okay, I have to stop you right away and zero in on the Stephen King example because this completely contradicts a golden rule of book collecting.

The physical ink of the author's pen elevates it from a mere mass-produced book to a unique authenticated artifact.

It proves Madeleine L'Engle actually held that specific physical object in her hands.

And we see a very similar psychological dynamic with the Bridget Jones's Diary example, right?

We do.

It requires the reader to constantly read between the lines to understand what is not being said in the dialogue.

And then on the other hand, the other major influence is Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary.

Which is basically the absolute antithesis of Wharton in terms of style.

Completely.

But what do you think made them so popular?

So in our book, we talk about them as being a product of what we call the long 1980s, which we kind of match from about 1977 to about 1995, which is the publication of Jackie Collins' Lovers and Gamblers through to the publication of Bridget Jones' Diary, basically, which marks that real turn into Chiclet and we see Bonk Busters start to fall down the bestseller list.

So there are a lot of things going on.

This is an excessive time.