Sue Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946 and left school at 15 years of age. She worked in a variety of jobs including factory worker and shop assistant, joining a writers' group at the Phoenix Theatre, Leceister in her thirties. At the age of 35, she won the Thames Television Playwright Award for her play Womberang (published in Bazaar and Rummage, 1984) and started her writing career. Other plays followed including The Great Celestial Cow (1984), Ten Tiny Fingers, Nine Tiny Toes (1990), and most recently Are You Sitting Comfortably? but she has become most well-known for her series of books about Adrian Mole.
The first of these, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 was published in 1982 and was followed by The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984). These two books made her the best-selling novelist of the 1980s. They have been followed by several more in the same series including Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (1993), and most recently, Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004). The books have been adapted for radio, television and theatre, the first book being broadcast on radio in 1982, and Adrian Mole:The Wilderness Years (1993) and Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (1999) also being serialised for radio. Sue Townsend also wrote the screenplays for television adaptations of the first and second books.
Several books have been adapted for the stage, including The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4: the Play (1985), and The Queen and I: a Play with Songs (1994) which was performed by the Out of Joint Touring Company at the Vaudeville Theatre and toured Australia. The latter play is based on another of her books, in which the Royal Family become deposed and take up residence on a council estate in Leicester. Other books include Rebuilding Coventry (1988) and Ghost Children (1997).
In 2001, Sue Townsend published The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman aged 55 3/4 (2001), a collection of monthly columns written for Sainsbury's magazine from 1993-2001. Leicester University awarded her an Honorary MA in 1991. Her most recent book is Queen Camilla (2006).
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE
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.
The Mole diaries provide the reader with a voyeuristic thrill, privy as we are to the character’s innermost thoughts. Adrian Mole is Suburban Everyman, desperate to be interesting and worldly. He is in constant fight against his own circumstances, his background, his very identity: 'I have just realised I have never seem a real female nipple or a dead body. This is what comes from living in a cul-de-sac.' Despite his protestations to intellectualism Mole often reveals his own cultural ignorance. 'There is a new girl in our class. She sits next to me in Geography. She is all right. Her name is Pandora, but she likes being called "Box". Don't ask me why.' He confuses Evelyn Waugh’s gender, and upon discovering his error goes on to do exactly the same thing with Waugh’s son, Auberon. Townsend has a lot of fun undercutting Mole’s artistic pretension - his decision to become a writer is, at first at least, one based more upon his notion of what a writer represents rather than an interest in writing - but in doing so she manages to generate an extraordinary empathy for her character.
Those of us who are more or less the same age as Mole have grown up with him and have, inevitably, measured our own lives against his. In an era in which certainties such as the job for life have disappeared, Mole’s shifts in fortune reveal that beneath his wildly unrealistic artistic ambitions lies an understanding of the practical necessity of work. He is, at various times, a minor civil servant at the Department of the Environment (with special responsibility for newts), an Offal chef and a second hand bookshop assistant. None of these, of course, represent his life’s dreams and Townsend seems to be offering a comment here on the tension between what we imagine for ourselves and what life offers us. This sense of disappointment, of failed or thwarted ambition, is something we can all relate to. It is brought into even sharper relief when we consider the upper middle class character of Pandora Braithwaite who has all the social, financial and cultural advantages that Mole lacks. Her steady rise in the world of politics and her constant romantic trysts serve as a painful counterpoint to Mole’s repeatedly stalled attempts to live the life he believes himself destined for: that of the urbane (at one point in the diaries he describes himself as wanting to be an ‘urban’) intellectual.
Like Willy Russell, Townsend is a writer for whom social commentary is as natural as breathing. 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. The withering anti-Thatcher poem, ‘Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep? / Do you weep like a sad willow? / On your Marks and Spencer’s pillow? / Are your tears molten steel? / Do you weep?’ may make us laugh at how seriously Mole takes it as a work of poetry but the ‘molten steel’ phrase jolts us out of any belief that Townsend is doing nothing more than engaging in gentle mockery of her character.
In Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004), the New Labour Government receives the same treatment. The bite beneath Mole’s letter to the Prime Minister asking for confirmation of his claim that Saddam Hussein’s weapons can hit Cyprus within 45 minutes, is made even more telling given that it is written out of Mole’s desire to get a refund back from his travel agent’s on a trip to Paphos. This, for me, is the essence of the Mole series. 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.
Inevitably, given her success with Adrian Mole, the rest of Townsend’s work tends to be overlooked. The most successful of her other novels is The Queen and I (1992), which turns on the conceit of the Royal family being forced out of Buckingham Palace by a new Republican Government and forced to live in one of the poorest Council House estates in the Midlands. It is full of a deliciously mocking wit, and offers a wholesale demolition of the entire institution of the Monarchy. The Queen and I asks why Britain tolerates its status as a constitutional monarchy in an age in which deference and respect for the Royal Family has all but evaporated.
Number Ten (2002), a thinly veiled attack on the vanity of New Labour, is not as effective as The Queen and I in its assault on an unpopular institution, in that it relies on weak puns and its criticism feels more affectionate than caustic. For all its apparent levity however, it does offer a reminder to its readers of the smugness of power, of how the first causality in any election victory is a sense of perspective.
Ghost Children (1997) differs from the rest of Townsend’s novels in its grittiness. An uncompromising portrait of exclusion, lost love and many different kinds of betrayal, there is a bleakness and a raw spirit to the book that is entirely different from her comic novels. We see how society fails and isolates its citizens. These are the kinds of concerns that Townsend has also dealt with in her plays, which are written with her characteristic verve and indignation. Set in places as diverse as an adult literacy class, a waiting room of a gynaecology clinic and a future in which only the upper classes are allowed to breed, they by turns delight, shock and engage.
We cannot help but return to Mole for he is the reason Townsend will be remembered. In the latest instalment there is the suggestion that Mole may finally have found some kind of happiness. Does this spell the end? If there are to be no further diaries in the series then maybe the next time you come to think of your New Year’s Resolutions list you can put 're-read Mole' at the top.
Garan Holcombe, 2004
*"I have a problem. I am an intellectual, but at the same time I am not very clever."
- Adrian Albert Mole
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