by Sue Townsend
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 devastating 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.
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
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 explains 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’.
