by Sue Townsend
1993 AUGUST 31ST
Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years is published with a ‘New Adult Adrian Mole!’ sticker on the front. Mole begins the book wearing a blazer and ends it swimming naked in the Aegean.
1999
Following consolidation within the publishing industry and the loss of key staff at Methuen, Townsend moves to Penguin, who acquire the rights to her future books and the Adrian Mole backlist.
Michael Joseph publish Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years. It is a number one bestseller and remains in the top three for four months.
2000
Penguin publish the paperback edition of Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years. The original audio-book is read by Nigel Planer, a later issue by Paul Daintry.
2001
Adrian Mole: the Cappuccino Years is produced as a six-part series for BBC1, written by Townsend, with Stephen Mangan as Adrian Mole, Alison Steadman as Pauline Mole, Helen Baxendale as Pandora, Zoe Wanamaker as Tania Braithewaite, Alun Armstong as George Mole, and Keith Allen as Peter Savage.
Mole fan Steven Mangan also reads the audio book re-recording of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole.
2004
Adrian Mole and The Weapons of Mass Destruction is published to wide acclaim, spends three months in the top ten, and is one of The Village Voice’s books of the year.
2007
Adrian Mole and The Weapons of Mass Destruction is re-released in the classic Penguin three-pane orange cover as one of the ‘Celebrations’ series.
2009 AUTUMN
As Townsend’s health suffers she is drawn to the subject of serious illness, and gives Adrian prostate ‘trouble’. He is maddened by the mispronunciation of prostate to ‘prostrate’ by his family and friends. Adrian Mole – The Prostrate Years is published by Michael Joseph in early November.
Sue Townsend’s papers, including the original Adrian Mole manuscripts, are held in the Special Collections archives at the University of Leicester, where she is a Distinguished Honorary Fellow, the highest award the University can give. She is an Honorary Doctor of Letters at Loughborough University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her awards include the Frink Award at the Women of the Year Awards, and a James Joyce Award of the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin. In 2009 she was given the Honorary Freedom of Leicester.
Adrian’s CV
Name: Adrian Albert Mole
DOB: 2nd April 1967
Place of Birth: Leicester, England
Address: 1 The Old Pigsty
The Piggeries
Bottom Field
Lower Lane
Mangold Parva
Leicestershire
Height: 5 feet seven inches
Weight: 10 Stones eight pounds in 1989
Marital Status: Married but only just
Next of kin: Mr and Mrs George Mole
2 The Old Pigsty
The Piggeries etc. etc. an alarming Proximity
KEY SKILLS:
– Novelist (unpublished: see enclosed literary CV for explanation)
– Poet (ditto)
– Playwright (unperformed)
– Fluent in Antiquarian Book Phraseology
– Offal Cheffing
– Parenting
– Proficient in cycling (major village-town commute)
CURRENT EMPLOYMENT:
– Senior Bookseller and Assistant Manager, Carlton-Hayes’ Second-hand and Antiquarian Books; High Street, Leicester takings last week: £132.69
EMPLOYMENT HISTORY AND REASONS FOR LEAVINGS:
– Catering Manager - Eddie’s Tea Bar
Two months frying burgers and changing the calor-gas cylinder in an A46 lay-by. I couldn’t forget Eddie’s warning words on my first day: ‘you’ll never shake off the stink of the fat, lad. It makes it hard to get a woman outside the trade.’
– Turkey Operative (Seasonal) – Mr Nobby Brown, Poulterer
Plucking recently deceased birds with six cackling women in an ill-lit shed
– Presenter of Offaly Good! (Pie Crust Productions)
Millennium Channel, Wednesdays, 10.30 a.m
(Co-presenter Dev Singh)
I realised that cooking offal and/or television presenting was not my forte.
It was the review from A.A. Gill in The Times ‘Offally Good! is offally bad. A wooden Presenter, Adrian Mole, stumbles and bumbles his way through twenty minutes of Crossroads-quality TV. We watch with horrible fascination as he makes sheep’s head broth. After twenty minutes Mole Produces a Pot of grey liquid, on the surface of which floats a layer of scum.’
And the G2 section of the Guardian:
‘Dev’s dazzling wit and uproarious physical comedy is in glorious contrast to the dour televisual presence of Adrian Mole, a pedant from Middle England.’
EMPLOYMENT HISTORY CONTINUED:
– Head Chef (Offal) at Hoi Polloi, Dean Street, London
I was reviewed in the national press: A.A. Gill in the SundayTimes The memory still hurts:
‘The sausage on my Plate could have been a turd: it looked like a turd, it tasted like a turd, it smelled like a turd, it had the texture of a turd. In fact, thinking about it, it probably was a turd.’
– Assistant Chef at Savages, Dean Street, London
washer upper, vegetable chopper
– Security consultant – Bell safe, Evington, Leicester
Three weeks selling alarms door to door for the alluring Bellinda Bellingham. A low point in my life. My sales patter started: ‘Don’t you think your family deserves more protection from the dark forces of evil that are at large in our community?’
– Civil Service Scientific Officer Grade One
Department of the Environment - Wildlife, Oxford
– Newt Development Officer,
with later responsibility for Badgers and Natterjack toads
sacked due to bogus biology A level certificate
– Library Assistant – Leicester Central Lending Library
I left after a dispute over Jane Austen with Miss Froggatt, the head librarian. I still maintain that her work is romantic fiction and does not belong in the literary stacks
– Paper delivery boy – Mr Cherry’s Newsagent
Resigned after Mr Cherry attempted to pervert me with free copies of Big ‘n’ Bouncy
VOLUNTARY WORK:
– Writing/Directing/Producing/Training
actor-dogs for the Mangold Parva Community Play
– Chairman of the Leicestershire and Rutland Writers’ Group
Two members remaining
– I am perpetually surrounded by needy pensioners
EDUCATION:
inadequate due to parental indifference and lack of Anglepoise lamp
RECREATIONS:
– Writing
– Reading
– Purchasing Stationary
– Letter Writing
– Contemplating Nature
Depressingly, I am tempted to add bickering with wife, eating crab paste sandwiches and satisfying mild addiction to both Starburst (formerly Opal Fruits) and hardcore Nurofen. Is this the summation of my life so far?
REFERENCES:
Mr. Hugh Carlton-Hayes, Antiquarian Bookseller
Dr. Pandora Braithwaite MP (with whom I once shared a flat in Oxford)
Adrian’s Literary CV
I am attempting to write my literary CV. I feel the need to reassess my writing career and the inexplicably negative critical response to my work. What to include from the vast body of material I have accumulated over the years? This is my hesitant first draft, it lacks a certain Je ne sais quoi that only I can do.
LITERARY CURRICULUM VITAE (BREVIS)
Adrian A. Mole
Published Work:
– Offally Good! – The Book! (Stoat Books, 1991)
Cookbook based on the cult Millennium Channel offal cookery show
Ghost-written in five days by Pauline Mole for 50% of all royalties and residuals. This expla
ins chapter ten, ‘The Future For Men Is Bleak; and the general over-emphasis on gender politics. My three-month struggle with the text tragically led to only one recipe - for pig’s trotters. My foreword - a learned treatise on primitive man’s experiments with the offal cut out of woolly mammoths etc. - which started so brilliantly, sadly came to nothing.
Reviewed in the Sunday Times Book Section - ‘Briefly’ column: ‘100 ways with offal - a hoot.’
I bought six copies of the Sunday Times. My mother rang later to ask if I’d seen ‘her’ review
LITERARY CURRICULUM VITAE (BREVIS)
Unpublished Work: everything else
Novels
– Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland
Later to be titled: Birdwatching
A Lawrentian treatment of late twentieth-century man and his dilemma, as Jake Westmoreland returns to the town of his birth after experiencing The World
– Sparg from Kronk
Or Krog of Gork
Originally a novel by Jake Westmoreland, hero of Lo!
The novel without language within Jake Westmoreland’s novels was praised as ‘a brilliant concept’, by the renowned novelist and celebrity Angela Hacker. Faxos - April 1992
Query: was Angela Hacker just being kind? She was drunk on Amstel most of the time. Is a novel without language within the hero’s unfinished Stone Age novel without dialogue within my novel about the dilemma of 20th century man worthy of the adjective ‘brilliant’? I wish I knew.
– Sty
The intellectual progress of a discontented pig
[My diray from Wednesday, April 12 1999 shows some early difficulties.
I embarked on a new novel, Sty, today. Progress was slow. I only managed to write 104 words, including the title and my name.
LITERARY CURRICULUM VITAE ( BREVIS)
Sty, by Adrian Mole
The pig grunted in its sty. It was deeply sad. Somehow it felt different from the other pigs with which it shared a home.
‘Look at them,’ thought the pig. ‘They are oblivious to the fact that they are merely part of the food chain.’ The pig had felt discontented since it had glimpsed Alain de Botton’s TV programme, Philosophy: A Guide to Life, through a gap in the pig farmer’s curtain. The wisdom of Socrates, Epicurus and Montaigne had brought home to the pig that it was completely uneducated and knew nothing of the world beyond the sty.
Notes on new novel:
1. Should the pig have a name?
2. Should the pig’s thoughts be in quotes?
3. Has the story got legs? Or is the main protagonist (the pig) too restricting a character, i.e., being (a) unable to communicate with the other Pigs and (b) never leaving the sty?}
Epic Poetry
– The Restless Tadpole
A tadpole’s journey from the early days of frogspawnhood to the dying moments of old frogdom
Prospectus for Monograph (Non-fiction)
– Celebrity and Madness
(A work in progress)
Charts the rise of celebritocracy and the subsequent demise of democracy in Britain today
I present part of the original preface:
LITERARY CURRICULUM VITAE (BREVIS)
I have been working on a book called Celebrity and Madness, for some weeks. On many an occasion I have stayed up until almost midnight; honing the sentences, adding the adjectives and creating new verbs. (I distinctly remember, while watching the Olympics with my mother, asking her ‘Has Britain medalled yet?’)
But, I digress. Celebrity and Madness is a well-researched work - many copies of the News of the World, Hello and Heat magazines were read. Scores of letters were written, though it must be said that few celebrities had the courtesy to reply. I listened to countless anecdotes told by my dearest friend, the recently disgraced Dr. Pandora Braithwaite M.P., former junior minister in the Department of the Environment, whose own book, Out of the Box was published last year, and condemned by Playboy, who said, ‘leaves a bad taste in the mouth’.
The book contains many examples of celebrities and their madness:
David Beckham has locked the keys inside his car on 91 different occasions!
Prince Charles tried to teach his favourite dog, Toby, to recite the Lord’s Prayer!
Liz Hurley keeps a succession of lucky spiders in a customized, Gucci, matchbox!
Sven Goran-Eriksson has a photograph of a long-dead pet reindeer on his bedside table!
Professor Laurier Taylor, the eminent sociologist, was sent a rough first draft and returned a compliment slip acknowledging receipt
Situation Comedy
– The White Van
A serial killer comedy, hopefully starring Russell Brand as the serial killer.
(The Performers have yet to be approached).
LITERARY CURRICULUM VITAE (BREVIS)
Plays
– Plague!
Writer/Dramaturg of a community play involving the total population of Mangold Parva (144 Souls plus intelligent animals), loosely based on the fact that the village was a centre for the Black Death. The animals are required to take part.
A typical stage direction would be: ‘The dogs bow their heads in unison and the chicken goes to center stage and lays an egg’. This coup de theatre may require the help of an animal trainer.
Difficult, but I think we can pull if off.
Agent: Brick Eagleburger at Brick Eagleburger Associates
[email protected]
Tuesday, November 21, 2000:
Brick Eagleburger had sent my epic poem, The Restless Tadpole, to a certain Geoffrey Perkins at BBC TV Centre. I asked Brick which department Mr Perkins worked in Brick said, ‘The guy’s head of fuckin’ comedy.’ I angrily Pointed out that The Restless Tadpole is an entirely serious dramtic work written in the tradition of the lcelandic sagas. Brick said, Listen up, Adrian, I flicked through the fuckin’ manuscript Tadpole and I godda tell ya I almost peed my fuckin’ Pants, it’s so funny.’ Brick carried on. My favourite scene is when the tadpole is lying in Marilyn Monroe’s garden pond and it overhears Arthur Miller talking crap about Tolstoy.’
I have always known that Brick Eagleburger is a Philistine, however, he is now totally misrepresenting me and my work.
This is where Mr Eagleburger and myself parted company for a while.
Adrian’s Family Tree
MOLE, DAISY (NÉE FLOWERS):
Wife of Adrian, half-sister of Marigold. Dark, ravishing ex-PR to the famous who claims to be ‘author of my own life’. Loathes the countryside, longs for Dean Street and is not amused at being reduced to flogging off her Jimmy Choos on eBay.
MOLE, GRACIE:
Adrian’s daughter. A precocious mini-Stalinist who hates her nursery uniform, preferring to drag her little mermaid tail to school.
BOTT, GLENN:
Adrian’s illegitimate son by Sharon Bott, in the Royal Logistics corp.
FINLEY ROSE:
Glenn’s very beautiful and well-balanced girlfriend. A fan of Silent Witness, she aspires to be a forensic pathologist.
BOTT, SHARON:
Old flame of Adrian’s. Mother of Glenn Bott. Also mother of Kent, Bradford and Caister.
RYAN:
Sharon Bott’s partner, a youth of 27 years.
JO JO:
Adrian’s ex-wife. Has moved back to Nigeria. Mother of William. Has beauty, brains, money and talent, and frankly was out of Adrian’s league, as well as being four inches taller than him.
MOLE, WILLIAM:
Adrian’s young son by African princess Jo Jo. After his parents’ separation, brought up by the Mole family in Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Unsurprisingly returns to his mother in Nigeria, changing his name to Wole Mole.
FLOWERS, MARIGOLD:
Thirty-something on-the-shelf depressive who once accidentally became Adrian’s girlfriend and is now his sister-in-law. Now married to Brain-box Henderson, über-geek before it was fashionable. They regularly converse in fluent Klingon.
HENDERSON,
BRUCE ‘BRAINBOX’:
Adrian’s old schoolmate and husband of Marigold. He also owns his own company, Idiotech, who specialize in ‘technology for idiots’.
FLOWERS, MICHAEL:
Father of Marigold and Daisy, proprietor of Country Organics. Keen member of the Madrigal Society.
FLOWERS, NETTA:
Wife of Michael and mother of Marigold and Daisy, another Madrigal.
FLOWERS, POPPY:
Sister of Marigold with extraordinarily long hair.
MOLE, GEORGE:
Adrian’s father. Although his many episodes of hospitalization, depression, unemployment and erectile dysfunction have taken their toll, he is still chain smoking and has had an ashtray welded onto the arm of his wheelchair. Despite their various tribulations, he still loves Pauline Mole.
MOLE, PAULINE:
Adrian’s perennially unfulfilled mother. Living in a semi-detached converted pigsty with the stroke-ridden George Mole is not how she expected things to turn out. Still possessing a certain tawdry glamour, she is determined to have one last sexual fling before she dies.