It was not in Jane Austen’s book. There is no swim in Pride and Prejudice; there is no white shirt clinging to its owner; there is no shocked encounter at the gates of Pemberley with a Mr. Darcy who has been in the water. The episode was Andrew Davies’s addition — a single five-second moment in his 1995 BBC adaptation, intended only as a quick bit of plot mechanics to get Darcy off-page and into a less guarded version of himself before Elizabeth could see him in his own house.
It went off like a flare. The series — six episodes, directed by Simon Langton, broadcast on BBC One from 24 September to 29 October 1995 — reached over ten million viewers at peak. The lake scene became a permanent fixture of British popular culture. The Royal Mail issued a stamp. Helen Fielding, a journalist filing a column for The Independent at the time, used Firth’s Darcy as the partial template for her own romantic male lead, and a few years later that lead was named Mark Darcy and Colin Firth was cast to play him in the film. The joke is the joke of pop culture itself: it eats its own offspring.