It's surprisingly easy to forget at this distance, nearly forty years on and post-Harry-Potter, but Adrian Mole was the British publishing sensation of the 1980s. Sue Townsend sold over six million copies of the first two books in the UK within the decade, which put her a long way ahead of niche authors like Jeffrey Archer, Jackie Collins and Barbara Taylor Bradford as the bestselling writer of the eighties. And yet, she was exactly the sort of "sponger" Mrs Thatcher was keenest to demonise: a working-class single mother from the East Midlands who left school at fifteen without any proper qualifications...

Like many other great comic writers, Townsend started out as a playwright, when she was persuaded, in her early thirties, to go to a writing workshop at a local theatre. A couple of successful stage plays were followed by a BBC commission for a short series of radio plays about a teenager called Nigel Mole (later changed to Adrian to avoid confusion with the hero of Down with skool!). And the rest, as they say, is history.

A lot of the appeal of Adrian Mole is quite simply down to it being very clever comic writing. All the diaries are full of brilliant one-liners and more sophisticated buried jokes, some that you would probably only spot on a third or fourth reading. There are brilliant set-pieces in which absurd situations are brought about in the most natural and plausible way imaginable. But it also succeeded commercially because of the way Townsend was able to sneak a lot of the hard realities of Thatcherite Britain into a superficially innocent narrative: it was a book that you could enjoy whether you were an adult or a teenager, working-class or middle-class, on the left or on the right. Re-reading forty years on, it's striking how multi-culti it was: even in the early eighties this very mainstream book was full of non-white, non-heterosexual and non-stereotype characters. Reading it obviously didn't reform British society and overcome its prejudices, but it might have mitigated a few of them.

Townsend talked about the diary form as a very easy one to work with: she felt that you could do anything you like with it, provided you stuck to a linear time-sequence. (And a single point of view, obviously.) In a way, teenage Adrian is just an updated Mr Pooter, reporting on things that don't make sense to him but are much clearer to us, and getting into embarrassing or humiliating situations that he tells us about in a disarmingly frank way (going to A&E with a model aeroplane stuck to his nose after a failed attempt to try glue-sniffing). His overestimation of his own literary talents and his failure to understand other people (especially women) often make him a little bit contemptible, but this is always offset by his honesty, kindness and compassion. The way he is constantly being seduced by elderly people into becoming their unpaid carer is much more important to us than his conviction that his experimental novel Lo! The flat hills of my homeland and his serial-killer sitcom The white van are masterpieces. We can't help liking him and feeling that, if we had the bad luck to get into situations like those he is constantly finding himself in, we probably wouldn't do much better at maintaining our dignity. ( )

I chose this book to read because one of the review of Henrick Groen's Diary said that the book was similar to Adrian Mole's Diary. The style is very similar as they are both diaries of characters that have very dry wits and are laugh out loud funny. The difference of course being that Henrick is 83 and Adrian is 13. Adrian's entries are about pimples, girls, being bullied at school, charity work with the elderly, and his parents marital problems. The book is a bit dated as it was written in the late 1970s. I think if the main characters of books are teenagers then they should be marketed as YA books and not adult books. I think most teenagers would understand the situations, there is not profanity or sexual references that a boy that age wouldn't get it. ( )

What a cracker. Laugh out loud diary of an adolescent... ( )

Adrian Mole is so good I don't know whether to admit that it makes me cry more often than I laugh at him. Miserable adolescence is the fate of most of us, but it is very well realised by Townsend. Hang in there, Adrian, we're rooting for you! ( )

Had its humorous, laugh-out-loud spots, but too few for the amount of reading necessary to find them.

All in all, a rather depressing book about a dysfunctional family.