Revealed: the sex change secret of Adrian Mole, aged 43

How could Townsend, a Leicester housewife and mother of three who scribbled away when the kids were in bed, have guessed the impact Adrian would have on a generation of children and their children?

For many of the admirers who post messages on the Adrian Mole Fan Club Facebook page he is the greatest diarist since Samuel Pepys; to others he is an old friend they turn to again and again, until the spine of each book disintegrates.

Some can’t quite reconcile themselves to the fact that Adrian isn’t real. Anyway, even if there isn’t a 43-year-old Adrian hiding out somewhere in the Midlands after his recent brush with prostate cancer, there is cause for glee: the BBC have dusted off the 1983 radio adaptations of The Secret Diary, read in seven parts by Nicholas Barnes, and it can be heard on Radio 4 Extra from this afternoon.

No matter that the early instalments of what would become nine novels are peppered with references to Margaret Thatcher, John Major and the Falklands War. The essential neither-boy-nor-man fixations of Adrian (who sits in his Rupert the Bear pyjamas worrying about the size of his body parts and lack of sexual experience) are still as true as they are funny.

Adrian captured both the zietgeist of Thatcher’s Britain and the inner life of an adolescent boy. Much of the comedy revolves around his delusions of himself as a Great Writer, and the character is encrusted with a thick seam of pseudo-intellectual cultural snob: “Myself I never read bestsellers on principle. It’s a good rule of thumb, if the masses like it then I’m sure I won’t.” He makes rubbish jokes about Simone de Beauvoir, and the ramblings of Malcolm Muggeridge.

Adrian’s pretensions know few limits, and he composes poetry for his beloved Pandora Braithwaite of monumental awfulness: “Pandora!/ I adore ya!/ I implore ye/Don’t ignore me!” There’s great comedy, too, in the fact that Adrian sees his bedroom as an oasis of cultural fertility amid the barren, dysfunctional desert of a chain-smoking, low-brow family. Through many disappointments at his lack of a glittering media career, Mole fans followed their icon to 2009, when Adrian suffered a huge health crisis as well as his sister Rosie’s paternity being discussed on The Jeremy Kyle Show. Well out of love with New Labour, the middle-aged Adrian would now, his readers believe, probably vote for Nick Clegg.

It’s been clear since the start that Adrian Mole was a teenage hero whose characterisation brilliantly mirrored the obsessions and boredom of teenagers, it was also aimed at an adult audience, who immediately tuned in to Townsend’s frequent swipes at the political establishment while screeching with laughter at the boy’s “desolation of the human spirit”.

Sonia Benster, who has run The Children’s Bookshop at Lindley in Huddersfield for 37 years, clearly remembers the start of Adrian Mole fever back in 1982.

“The book was published, then Radio 4 serialised it and people came in droves. Really, there had been very little literature that covered the age of teenage angst before.

“Adrian Mole was the start of funny teenage literature, and provided a bridge between children’s and adults’ books. Trends come and go, and since Mole we’ve seen a long period of fantasy fiction, followed by vampires.

“Adrian Mole books still sell in a trickle, but their status is, I would say, much like that of the Just William books.

“They are great quality, written in an authentic voice, and will always be around because of that. Parents and grandparents who treasured them in their youth will always buy them for children, and fondly remember their own agonised youth, seemingly being expressed by Adrian’s tribulations. We see 10,000 new children’s books a year, so it’s amazing that the original Adrian Mole is still published.”

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Archive broadcasts of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ will be serialised in seven parts on Radio 4 Extra at 2.45pm from today. The Mole Truth with Sue Townsend can be heard on R4 Extra at 9am on Saturday, September 24.