Every Monday (well, most of them) we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers. We’d like that thank Vivian Widgery for giving us the chance to revisit this cartoon from 1988.

The 80s was the era of Madonna’s “Material Girl” and “Perfect” by Fairground Attraction. In those heady Thatcherite days romance was out and aspiration was in. Many women were “Looking for a Man in Finance” decades before it became a social media meme. From nice middle-class girls like Penny, who would be expected to settle down with a successful banker or lawyer, to Essex girls, taking the train into Liverpool Street on a Thursday night and staking out the City wine bars in the hope of meeting some ex-market stall trader who had made good on a gilts desk.

Bridget took this to the next stage: mean, mercenary and materialistic, she remains, oddly, one of our most popular characters. She embodied the sexuality of the drive for wealth and status. Alex loved money, but we don’t think he was ever erotically aroused by it. Money and sex are both commodities which you can never have too much of: and of course each is readily exchangeable for the other.

The jeep with the rhino emblem on the spare wheel cover that Bridget was lusting after was a Suzuki Jimny. This was not the most prestigious brand of off-roader available, but we don’t think that Bridget ever had very upmarket taste. In the late 80s these working vehicles were starting to become lifestyle statements and people who lived and worked in London would drive their 4x4s round the capital (perhaps it’s a bit more justified these days with the amount of potholes on the streets). As to why they did this, well, the lady on TikTok who was looking for a “Man in Finance” also wanted him to have a trust fund, so perhaps in the same way those 80s bankers wanted to suggest that in addition to holding down well-paid jobs in the City they also owned country estates. Ironically many of these bankers from the 80s have now retired and indeed live on farms in Dorset or Yorkshire.

Bridget’s character wasn’t based on anyone in particular. She just seemed like the sort of vengeful harpy that a wimp like Clive would end up with and we invented her mainly so we could subject him to some domestic bullying in addition to the workplace abuse he suffered at the hands of Alex and Rupert. She was named Bridget after a friend of Russell’s, who was a bit pushy (but actually very nice and not at all like the cartoon Bridget, so we’d like to offer her this belated apology).

Despite this, one female reader became convinced that Bridget was based on her. Apparently several of the insensitive and self-serving things that Bridget had done to Clive in the cartoon were alarmingly similar to incidents in this lady’s own relationship: to such an extent that she got her boyfriend to phone us up and check that we weren’t being fed stories about her. We weren’t. But we were amused that she was so narcissistic and paranoid that she thought we could be persuaded to carry out someone else’s personal vendettas in our strip. Cartoon Bridget would have been proud.

When this cartoon appeared Alex had just come back from his honeymoon safari, hence him bringing Clive the rhino horn powder. Such products have been banned from international sale since 1977, so in order to obtain some Alex must have done something seriously underhand and illicit. Nothing new there then..

If you click on the strip above you can see it in its original 1980s context.

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.