‘A lazy, self-indulgent book has now been turned into a lazy, self-indulgent movie’

Film censor’s savage verdict on Bridget Jones... before it made £250m at box office

HER barrister boyfriend described her as a ‘verbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish and dresses like her mother’.

Now it appears film examiners were equally dismissive of Bridget Jones, deriding the 2001 smash-hit film about the eponymous diarist as ‘vapid’. Files from the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) archive reveal some members pilloried the tale of a 30-something heroine (Renee Zellweger) and her romantic feelings for womaniser Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) and eventual love, barrister Mark Darcy (Colin Firth).

They criticised Helen Fielding’s hit novel as well as the film, co-written with Richard Curtis, which took £250million at the global box office.

Prior to the general release of Bridget Jones’s Diary, one unidentified examiner wrote: ‘Vapid, picaresque nonsense centring on the travails of bourgeois thirtysomethings. Lazy and self-indulgent novel transformed into a lazy and self-indulgent film…

‘The “plot” centres on the eponymous heroine who despite being intelligent, attractive, open and natural finds it difficult to attract or keep a suitor. If and when you accept that then just about everything else makes sense.’

The examiners, who helped give the movie its age 15 rating, also had no time for the characterisation in the film, which was well received by the critics.

‘To say that characters are as flat as cardboard is a slur on the properties of a very useful material. Tissue paper would be nearer the mark,’ they lamented. There were also complaints about the use of expletives, complaining: ‘The word f**k weighed in around 30 uses, mostly good natured, if somewhat gratuitously employed (the middle classes have, of late, embraced swearing and football – much to the detriment of both some would argue and without much understanding or flair for either).’

They add: ‘This is most notable near the end of the film when Bridget embraces Mark and one of her female pals yells some ribald and instantly forgettable dialogue that contains (for no good reason that I can come up with) half a dozen f***s.’ A BBFC expert was also not taken by the 1999 box office hit Notting Hill, again starring Hugh Grant and written by Richard Curtis.

Comparing it to Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, one examiner wrote: ‘This feature will disappoint those expecting something as sharp as his usual output or as polished as Four Weddings.

‘I found it tiresomely sloppy, with only occasional glimpses of the wit that might have made it seem less drawn out. My viewing partner and I had no difficulties in predicting the next line of dialogue on several occasions and we weren’t even being paid to write it.

‘The stars will also have some appeal, and the Four Weddings audience might go along hoping for more of the same, but that’s really the problem, it’s never moved on from Four Weddings (same car chase through London, same types of characters).’

‘The characters are as flat as cardboard’