The lady behind Bridget Jones has claimed she was groped repeatedly while working for the BBC.
Helen Fielding, who penned the legendary 1996 novel Bridget Jones’s Diary and spawned a multimedia franchise, joined the BBC as a researcher in 1979.
After leaving the broadcaster, she labored as a journalist, the place the concept for the Bridget Jones character started as an unattributed column in The Independent.
From there, she grew to become a novelist and penned a number of books, together with three Bridget Jones novels—Bridget Jones’s Diary in 1996, The Edge of Reason in 1999, and Mad About the Boy in 2013.
The books grew to become a serious movie franchise, with Renée Zellweger within the titular function of Bridget, starring reverse love pursuits Hugh Grant and Colin Firth.
As a consequence, Helen, 67, is without doubt one of the largest names in British publishing, however her newest story comes from when she was making her first steps within the trade.
She joined the BBC at the age of 21, when, as she informed the Soho Summit, office sexual harassment went unpunished throughout a number of industries and trades.
‘I worked at the BBC when I was in my 20s, and you just got used to the fact that people would actually put their hand on your boob while they were talking to you about work,’ she mentioned, by way of MailOnline.
Helen didn’t instantly title any of her BBC colleagues in relation to her claims, nor did she instantly accuse every other members of workers at the organisaiton.
Describing groping as an on a regular basis incidence, Helen added that ladies her age had been anticipated to ‘put up with’ harassment from older male colleagues.
When contacted for remark, a BBC spokesperson informed Metro in response to Helen’s claims: ‘We’re sorry to listen to of those experiences. Attitudes and behaviours have modified considerably within the final 40 years and the BBC—like the remainder of society—could be very completely different place now to what it was then.’
Elsewhere, Helen additionally mirrored on the trade as an entire and the period of Bridget Jones: ‘I first wrote Bridget pre-#MeToo—and when I look at that film now, I can’t consider that that stuff was occurring,’ she mentioned of the male characters within the novel who harass Bridget every day.
One such character, who makes it into the 2001 movie adaptation, is Bridget’s leering boss, Mr. Fitzherbert, whom Bridget refers to as ‘Mr. T**spervert’.
And, in fact, followers of the movies will bear in mind when Hugh Grant’s Daniel Cleaver – Bridget’s different boss – pinches Bridget’s bottom while the 2 share a trip in a carry.
Speaking in regards to the film trade in the present day, Helen argued that, while they may be higher disguised, the identical attitudes stay from the Seventies and Eighties.
‘You still have to fight much harder as a woman, even a successful woman, and you get treated in ways that men would not be treated. And there’s no denying that it’s nonetheless occurring and it wants to vary.’
Helen’s first novel was a 1994 satirical story titled Cause Celeb, which was primarily based on the connection between celebrities and refugees in a fictional East African nation.
Aside from the Bridget Jones novels, she additionally penned the 2003 comedian spy guide Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, which tells the story of a girl following a person she believes to be a terrorist.
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