Hello, I'm Kesti Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast

in 1991 and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My cast away this week is a biographer. She's charted the life of one man from boyhood to maturity.

She chose him because in many respects his life mirrors her own.

Like her hero she comes from a poor but not deprived background and always nursed an ambition to be a writer.

Unlike him however, she has now achieved what she wanted while he has yet to prove himself.

He is Adrian Moll, my cast away is his creator Sue Townsend.

You and Adrian are very similar in so many ways Sue. I mean what's he in fact in the beginning a male version of you at 13 and 3 quarters?

Well I don't know where you found this out because I've only recently started to tell the truth about this.

Yes we do have a lot in common. Certainly when I was Adrian Moll's age, 13 and 3 quarters I was very pretentious.

I used to walk around with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy under my arm with a spine showing to a very indifferent public.

To prove to the world that I could read and I like the Russians and so on.

Why did you write him as a chap? Why didn't you do him as a girl which is what you were?

To keep a certain amount of distance it's always more interesting I think if you distance yourself from your characters.

And also boys are far more, I mean it's easier to laugh at a boy or a man because they have more to hide, they tend to hide their feelings.

And the whole point about the diaries is that their secret not meant to be read.

I suppose it's true isn't it that the awkwardness of a young boy going through puberty is perhaps funny.

I mean Adrian constantly is preoccupied with the size of his penis or the dirty magazine under his mattress and so on.

It's just a more comic, more fertile ground.

Well of course girls measure their breasts, they're very anxious about the size of their waist and in particular they have the tape measure around the tops of their thighs.

They measure their ankles, they don't have a desperate need to shave the whole time.

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