Adrian Mole - Other Media

Other Media

• The character originated in a Thirty-Minute Theatre play on BBC Radio 4 called "The Diary of Nigel Mole, Aged 13¼", broadcast on 2 January 1982, with Nicholas Barnes as Nigel. The first name was changed to Adrian in the subsequent book as the original was thought to be too close to that of the satirical character in children's literature Nigel Molesworth (whom Sue Townsend said she had previously not heard of). The phrase "Adrian's mole" is found in the poem "The Bells of Shandon" by Francis Sylvester Mahony ("Father Prout"), and refers to the Roman emperor Hadrian's tomb (Castel Sant'Angelo).
• The books spawned three TV series. The first, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, was made by Thames Television for the ITV network and broadcast between 16 September and 21 October 1985. It starred Gian Sammarco as Adrian Mole with Julie Walters playing his mother. The sequel, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole was broadcast between 5 January and 9 February 1987 with Lulu replacing Julie Walters as Adrian's mother. Adrian Mole: the Cappuccino Years was broadcast on BBC One between 2 February and 9 March 2001, starring Stephen Mangan as Adrian Mole, Alison Steadman as Pauline Mole and Helen Baxendale as Pandora Braithwaite.
• The character also featured in several radio series, such as Pirate Radio Four in 1985.
• A stage musical was written by Sue Townsend in 1984 of the first book - The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾: The Play with music and lyrics by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley. It starred Simon Schatzberger as Adrian Mole and Sheila Steafel as Pauline Mole. It was first performed at Phoenix Arts, Leicester and went to Wyndham's Theatre, London in December 1984.
• The first two books were adapted into computer adventure games by Level 9 Computing in the 1980s.
• It has become a regular play among the world, e.g., the Roo Theatre in Australia
• A less well-known chapter of Adrian's life was chronicled in a weekly column called Diary of a Provincial Man, which ran in The Guardian from December 1999 to November 2001. This material was published as The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001. Set contemporaneously, as all the diaries are, it fills in two of the gap years between Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years and Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction. Adrian spends this period living on a crime-ridden council estate with his sons, has an on-off romance with a woman named Pamela Pigg, and temporarily works in a lay-by trailer cafe. He befriends yet another pensioner who subsequently dies, and has a brief infatuation with his male therapist (which he insists is wholly spiritual, not homosexual). The series includes comment on the petrol crisis of 2000, the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terrorism. Adrian's illegitimate half-brother Brett Mole, born on 5 August 1982, is reintroduced as a 19 year-old; he is an athletic, popular, confident, promiscuous, super-intelligent Oxford undergraduate, already a published poet and TV documentarian - in short, the person Adrian always wanted to be. Brett's mediocre older sibling soon comes to regard him with envious loathing. In what was apparently supposed to be a retrospectively-written preface to the re-published Diaries, Mole notes their re-publication in novel-form and suggests that Townsend is impersonating him and profiting from his writings. He also claims that his life is still not as happy as he would like, but 'that is another story' - suggesting that there is another diary to come.
• To mark the royal wedding between Prince William and Catherine Middleton, Sue Townsend wrote an exclusive Adrian Mole story for the Observer in 2011.

Although the period on a sink council estate is referred to briefly in The Cappuccino Years, the events of Diary of a Provincial Man are perhaps not strictly canonical. For example, Adrian later states that he can count the women he has had carnal knowledge of "on the fingers of one hand". Those women would be: Sharon Bott, Bianca Dartington, JoJo Mole, Marigold and Daisy Flowers. Inserting Pamela Pigg into this list makes six - more than the fingers of one hand, unless Adrian is polydactyl. The third wedding of Adrian's parents is described; however, Ivan Braithwaite does not drown whilst on honeymoon with Pauline Mole as detailed in "The Weapons of Mass Destruction" - instead he ultimately returns to his first wife, prompting George and Pauline to reunite (in "The Weapons of Mass Destruction", Pandora states that Pauline lured George away from Tania in the wake of Ivan's death). Also, Adrian's ex-wife JoJo e-mails him from Nigeria and names her new husband as one Colonel Ephat Mapfumo. In The Cappuccino Years, her husband's name is Wole.

• An even less well-known chapter of Adrian's life appeared in the Christmas 1994 edition of the Radio Times. Titled "Mole Cooks his Goose" it covered a stay by Adrian and Jojo at his mother's house over Christmas. It has never been republished.