by Sue Townsend
Which authors have most influenced you as a writer?
In rough chronological order:
Richmal Crompton, Charlotte Brontë, Alfred E. Nuemann (Mad comic), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Dickens, George Elliot, Oscar Wilde, Chekov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Stella Gibbons, Iris Murdoch, Flaubert, John Updike, Richard North.
Do you get much opportunity to meet or interact with your readers?
I have become a recluse lately as a result of ill health and late-onset shyness, but on rare outings I like to meet readers.
Is there any truth to the rumour put about by one A. Mole that you stole and profited from his life?
Yes. I ruthlessly exploited him. But he can’t afford to sue me due to the new legislation on legal aid. Mole no longer qualifies. He should have taken me to court years ago.
The Mole Story
Adrian Mole is one of the most memorable and enduring comic creations of recent decades. Long before Bridget Jones we had the diaries of the neglected intellectual of Ashby de la Zouch: neurotic, acne ridden and hopelessly devoted to Pandora Braithwaite. Mole’s is a particularly British story: that of continued, almost heroic, failure. Despite his best intentions he never quite gets what he wants. Like Basil Fawlty and, more recently, David Brent, much of the comedy in these books derives from self-delusion. It is the repetition of the same errors which invests these characters with a kind of tragic grandeur. We identify with them not because they are grotesque caricatures but because we know there is something of all of us within them.
Throughout the Mole books, Townsend has offered a caustic evaluation of contemporary Britain. There is an underlying seriousness to her work, a political consciousness, the desire to attack injustice and intolerance. Townsend is able to say in a couple of sentences what it would take many political journalists a thousand words to convey. Mole is an unknowingly subversive character and that is why he causes such delight. Laugh-out-loud funny, yet often painfully sad and poignant, the Mole books reveal Townsend’s natural sense of comic timing and empathetic gifts.
Garan Holcombe, British Council Contemporary Writers
1946 – 1953
Sue Townsend is born in Leicester and brought up in a semi-rural suburb, where she lives in a prefabricated bungalow on an unadopted mud road. Most of her free time is spent playing in the surrounding fields and woods of a country estate.
1953
At eight, she is frightened of her violent teacher, can’t read, and has had the same book on her desk for three years. While Townsend is absent from school with mumps, her mother buys a stack of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books, and teaches her to read in three weeks. It begins a life-long addiction to print. She reads three books a day until local librarians accuse her of attention seeking.
1960
By fourteen she excels at English, writes for the school magazine and has toured various churches and mental institutions as Jesus in the Passion of Christ. Her book addiction is sated by second-hand orange Penguin classics bought from market stalls. ‘I would ponce about Leicester with the spines of the books pointing to the public. A very indifferent public.’ After a school visit to Rome, Capri and Naples, returning to the dour greyness of 1950s Leicester badly affects the young Townsend. After this trauma, and heavily influenced by a recent reading of Dostoevsky: ‘I took to the black. White face, white lips, black eyes, black clothing. Juliette Greco bohemian.’
Entering the only coffee bar in town, copy of The Idiot in hand, and asking a man who looks intelligent how to pronounce Dostoevsky, she is immediately accepted as a part of Leicester bohemian society. There are few suitable careers in Leicester for a black-clad aesthete with no qualifications. As school leaving day approaches Townsend is urged by her Drama and English teachers to transfer to the Grammar School and take some exams; but the uniform would cost her parents a month’s wages, and she leaves school a week before her fifteenth birthday.
She works in a shoe factory, sells encyclopaedias door to door, and is sacked from the best and most pretentious dress shop in Leicestershire for reading Oscar Wilde in a changing cubicle. She works as a petrol attendant, with a paperback stuffed into the BP standard-issue duffle coat. She misses writing and carries on in secret.
1964
At eighteen she marries a sheet metal-worker; the marriage doesn’t last, and at twenty-three she is on her own with three young children and three jobs. Always tired and always worried, she writes semi-autobiographical prose and poetry when the children are asleep and hides it.
The only good job is at the youth club on her estate, where she works for eleven years, overhearing the conversations adults are not meant to hear. It leads to building and running an adventure playground on the tougher estate next-door. She writes pantomimes and plays for the children, receiving regular deputations of young men requesting knife-fight scenes.
1975 SUMMER
‘I was living in a council house at the time, on my own with three kids and three part-time jobs to keep us going. So Sunday was a total collapse; I was exhausted. My eldest son said, ‘Why can’t we go to safari parks like other families do?’ The answer is that they have no money, no car and she feels sorry for the animals, but his martyred tone triggers the memory of her own harsh criticism of the adult world as a powerless child: ‘That adolescent, self-pitying voice. Mole’s voice. I just heard it. He descended with his family in the space of an afternoon.’ She writes it down in diary form, completing the opening two and a half months in one burst, files it in a box and forgets it.
1978
She meets Colin Broadway, who will become her second husband. Three weeks after the birth of their daughter she admits to him that she writes secretly, and has done for twenty years. It fills a fridge-box stuffed into the under-stairs cupboard. He has heard of a writers’ group at the Phoenix Theatre, and encourages her to join.
The Phoenix is Leicester’s 300-seat ‘second’ theatre, with a writers group which uses actors to perform new plays. She attends two meetings without speaking. At the third, director Ian Giles asks her to bring some work that they can read and discuss. She has never written a play, but returns two weeks later with Womberang, a comedy set in a gynaecological waiting room. It has ten female parts, one male, and lasts thirty minutes. The structure is ‘unorthodox’, but as soon as the actors begin to read they are laughing out loud.
1979
Ian Giles puts Womberang forward for the 1979 Thames Television Playwright Award. John Mortimer is chair of the panel; he likes the play, reads it aloud and makes his fellow judges laugh. Townsend wins the prize, a £2,000 bursary to work for a year as writer in residence at the sponsoring theatre. She is terrified, and her training as a professional dramatist begins.
1980 JULY
Phoenix actor Nigel Bennett is auditioning for Huckleberry Finn and asks Townsend if she has anything he can use. She remembers the Mole diary and digs out the handwritten script. Bennett is the first to perform the Mole character, in a writers’ group meeting. He types the script up and works on adapting it for a one-man show.
October
Townsend rewrites part of the original diary for a new local arts publication, edited by Leicester playwright David Campton, and put together on her kitchen table. Mole is published for the first time in the October 1980 edition of the arts journal magazine, under the title Excerpts From the Secret Diary of Nigel Mole, aged 14 ¾.
NOVEMBER
On a visit to Townsend’s home, her theatrical agent Janet Fillingham sees a file of Mole material. Fillingham thinks it would make a good radio script and sends a Nigel Mole monologue to Vanessa Whitburn at BBC Radio Birmingham. Ms Whitburn turns it down.
1981 FEBRUARY
A version of ‘The Diary of Nigel Mole’ is sent to the Assistant Head of Radio Drama for Radio 4, John Tydeman. It sit on his desk for a month, but ‘When I finally read it, I thought it was marvellous.’ He decides to produce it as a thirty-minute monolo
gue.
MARCH 10TH
John Tydeman officially commissions ‘The Diary of Nigel Mole’ for Radio Four, and promises more episodes will be considered ‘if it is as successful as it ought to be’.
APRIL
There are concerns at the BBC that the character’s name is too similar to the public schoolboy Nigel Molesworth, from the Down with Skool! books by Geoffrey Willans. Tydeman writes to Townsend that the character is established as Nigel Mole and will be broadcast under that title. He advises her that there ‘is a lot of mileage in Mole’ and that she should try to get a diary published.
SEPTEMBER
Janet Fillingham sends the radio script to Geoffrey Strachan at Methuen, who is responsible for the Monty Python books and Simon Bond’s hugely successful 101 Uses of a Dead Cat. He is, in the words of Fillingham’s colleague Giles Gordon, later Townsend’s agent – ‘the greatest publisher of the humour book’.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER
Geoffrey Strachan is keen on the script and the writer. ‘I met Sue soon after and was immediately impressed. She was very funny and had a tremendous sense of what she was doing.’ He requests a treatment for the book that he can sell to the Methuen board, but is unhappy with the similarity to ‘Nigel Molesworth’ and asks for a name change. Townsend sends him a typescript treatment using ‘Malcolm Mole’. A contract is signed with Methuen.
‘Malcolm’ reminds Townsend of blocked sinuses and she looks for an alternative. A handwritten sheet shows her working through some unlikely variations; wisely putting a cross next to the name of her second son, who would have been very unhappy with ‘Daniel Mole’. She is looking for something ‘upper working class’, unthreatening, with a soft, feminine quality. After the low point of ‘Darius’ and ‘Marius’, ‘Adrian’ appears twice at the right-hand side of the page.
Townsend is not convinced and writes to Strachan, asking him to reconsider. ‘Are you absolutely dead set against “Nigel Mole”? I am suffering severe withdrawal symptoms. I have lived closely with Nigel for a couple of years and Adrian can’t take his place. I’ve tried to accommodate him but failed.’ Strachan’s long experience as a publisher tells him that the two characters would always be confused, and he is not persuaded. It is a bad moment for university lecturer Adrian Mole, who in an interview in a Sunday broadsheet, claimed that his life has been ruined by sniggering students.
1982 JANUARY 2ND
The Diary of Nigel Mole, aged 13¾ is broadcast on Radio Four’s Thirty Minute Theatre, read by Nicholas Barnes. The Times calls it ‘a delightful original’, and within days five publishers have contacted John Tydeman.
APRIL/MAY
The book is sent to Strachan in instalments. He commissions Caroline Holden to provide the illustrations. A number of people at Methuen are in favour of printing 3,000 copies, but Strachan thinks the book is ‘a bit special’ and decides on a first edition of 7,500, at the accessible price of £4.95.
Townsend asks Strachan if her name can be removed from the cover, arguing that ‘It was supposed to be written by a 13¾-year-old boy. It seemed stupid to have my name on it. But he said gravely it was a wonderful thing to write a book, and that I should take the credit.’ She has an advance of £1,500 and is worried about covering it.
‘I thought Methuen were mad to print 7,500. I thought it would be remaindered by Christmas’.
JUNE
The Methuen sales team are selling the book before it even exists. Often the booksellers have heard the radio production and are enthusing about the character to the reps.
JULY 30TH
In the first mention of an Adrian Mole book in print media, Leo Cooper in Publishing News praises ‘The funniest book I have read for ages … I welcome a genuine new talent.’
SEPTEMBER
Pre-publicity is limited, with very few author interviews. There are serializations in the Evening Standard and Woman’s Realm, and Radio Four puts out seven 15-minute episodes to a hugely positive response. Tom Sharpe reads an advance copy and is reduced to tears of laughter. The most successful comic novelist of the time gives a rave review for the jacket.
OCTOBER 7TH
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13¾ is published by Methuen. The initial run sells out before publication. The book is reprinted and continues to sell quickly through word of mouth; helped by a Jilly Cooper review which calls it ‘touching and screamingly funny’, and comparing it to Catcher in the Rye. Strachan commissions a sequel.
OCTOBER 31ST
The book enters the Sunday Times bestseller charts at number six. Townsend idly scans the book charts as usual and is amazed, delighted and relieved.
NOVEMBER
The Secret Diary tops the best-seller list. It will remain in the charts for twenty weeks. Thames buy the TV rights for ITV.
1983
By the end of January hardback sales are over 60,000
OCTOBER 27TH
The paperback edition of the Secret Diary is published. The book reaches the widest possible audience and sales explode. According to David Ross, marketing director of Methuen, ‘it started with the parent generation and filtered downwards. The paperback put Adrian Mole into the school playground.’ Adrian Mole is one of the rare popular classics that was originally written for adults and eventually appealed to every generation.
NOVEMBER 7TH
The paperback hits number one in the Sunday Times bestseller charts, with 275,000 copies in print. More than two years later it is still at number two, kept from the top spot by its sequel.
1984
At the end of March sales have exceeded 600,000. Strachan estimates it is selling 10,000 copies per week. Townsend has spent the winter and spring working on the sequel, and by April Methuen have the complete manuscript of The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole.
AUGUST 2ND
The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole is published. On published day 100,000 hardback copies are in print, supplied in a 56-copy string-vest display box.
SEPTEMBER
250,000 hardback copies of Growing Pains have been sold. Sue Townsend has the number one book in both hardback and paperback charts. After the Frankfurt book fair Paul Marsh has sold translation rights to every country in Western Europe.
NOVEMBER
The paperback edition of the Secret Diary has sold more than one million copies.
Adrian Mole: The Play, premiered at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester, begins a run of two years in the West End.
1985
In January hardback sales of Growing Pains stand at 450,000.
1ST AUGUST
The paperback of The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole is published, enters the bestseller chart at number one, and stays there for over a year.
SEPTEMBER
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole is premiered on ITV, written by Townsend and Trevor Waite, starring Gian Sammarco as Adrian Mole, Julie Walters as Pauline and Beryl Reid as Grandma Mole. Sammarco has been chosen from 6,000 applicants. Mole runs for two series, with Lulu taking over as Pauline Mole for season two, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, written by Patrick Barlow. The theme song by Ian Dury, ‘Profoundly in Love with Pandora’, reaches 45 in the singles charts.
NOVEMBER
The paperback editions of the Mole books remain at the top of the bestseller chart two years after the original paperback publication of the Secret Diary. Total paperback sales are approaching four million.
1986
The two original Mole books are published in the US by Grove, as a one-volume edition, The Adrian Mole Diaries. The reviews are characterized as ‘simply extraordinary’ by the publisher. The great American comedienne Phyllis Diller is an early fan: ‘A wonderfully touching, hilarious book. It goes beyond Catcher in the Rye. You must read it. Trust me!’ Newsweek pronounces that ‘Adrian Mole, superstar, has become one of the biggest successes in the history of British publishing’. The New York Times raves: ‘Part Woody Allen, part a kindred spirit to Philip Roth’s early novellas … as sad and devasta
ting as it is laugh-out-loud funny!
1990
In an end-of-the-decade survey in the Guardian, headlined ‘Mole triumphant over Archer$$$$, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole is the top paperback of the eighties, with three million copies sold, beating Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer into second place. Jackie Collins and Barbara Taylor Bradford trail behind. The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole is the top hardback. Total Mole sales in English alone total six million and Sue Townsend is the best-selling author of the eighties in terms of individual books. Later, through a third party, Archer lets it be known that he would like to speak to her. Townsend has little to discuss with the ex-Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, and a meeting doesn’t take place.