Everything we know about Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy as the ...

Bridget Jones is back on her quest for love in Mad About The Boy

There is, perhaps, no character who has captured the nation's hearts quite like the loveable everywoman, Bridget Jones, who has become one of pop culture's most memorable figures. The fourth Bridget Jones film, therefore, is hotly anticipated – and a new trailer giving a taste of what we can expect has only served to further excitement.

Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy sees our heroine (once cinema's most renowned singleton) alone again after the death of her husband, Mark Darcy, balancing her career with raising two young children on her own. The only area she's neglecting? Her love life. The trailer for the film starts with Bridget walking, alone, down a London street, before she reunites with a vision of her husband at the front door of a friend's house. ‘In life, there are memories that will never leave us,’ she says, before Darcy disappears in the blink of an eye. ‘But sometimes, those memories are suddenly all we’re left with.’

As per the official plot synopsis, Darcy has been killed on a humanitarian mission in the Sudan, leaving a fifty-something Bridget with 9-year-old Billy and 4-year-old Mabel, stuck in a ‘state of emotional limbo, raising her children with help from her loyal friends’. In the book of the same name on which the film will be based, Darcy is similarly written out and, in the past, author Helen Fielding has said this was because she didn't want Bridget to become ‘a smug married’ – a fate which, as viewers of the first film will remember, Bridget herself deemed utterly contemptible.

While Bridget appears to be living in the past when it comes to her love life, her friends – including straight-talking obstetrician Dr Rawlings (Emma Thompson), sex-mad colleague Miranda (Sarah Solemani) as well as fan-favourites Shazza and Tom (Sally Phillips and James Callis) – take a dimmer, and certainly more pragmatic, view of her situation. In the trailer, when Bridget attends a dinner party solo, a friend tells her: ‘It’s been four years now.’ Shazza concludes that she ‘just has to get laid’, while the dastardly dashing Daniel Cleaver, back from the dead and portrayed as rakishly as ever by Hugh Grant, puts it in his more earthy way, calling Bridget ‘effectively a nun – a very, very naughty nun’.

Miranda sets Bridget up on Tinder in an effort to help her find a man, but it turns out that she needs rather less intervention – soon finding herself two, willing suitors. Mr Wallaker, played by BAFTA-winner Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a teacher at Bridget's children's school, while Leo Woodall of The White Lotus and One Day takes on the role of the handsome Roxster, who just happens to be 29 years old. While there are certainly plenty of laughs in store (Cleaver, for one, appears to be back on his marvellously smooth best) the trailer also teases at many more touching moments.

‘Do you miss Dada sometimes?’ Mabel asks her mother, to which Bridget responds: ‘I miss him all of the times.’ Grief will, it seems, feature heavily in the film, as another moving scene shows Bridget's father asking her: ‘Can you survive? It’s not enough to survive, you've got to live.’ According to the official synopsis, ‘now juggling work, home and romance, Bridget grapples with the judgment of the perfect mums at school [and] worries about Billy as he struggles with the absence of his father’.

Directed by Michael Morris – the man behind Better Call Saul – and written by original Bridget Jones writer Helen Fielding along with Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan, Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy is in being created by Universal Pictures and Working Title. It's due to be released on 14 February next year (a prescient date, given Bridget's long and often complicated search for love).