Back to the Eighties with Adrian Mole

Why teen diarist deserves this TV reboot

- Mike Ward

YOU may not think it to look at him, but this boy is up there with Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf and 1980s Conservative minister Alan Clark as one of our all-time great diarists.

Not only that, he's funnier than all three put together. Mostly unintentionally, but that's the whole point. The woes of adolescence consume him, from his family's spats to his troublesome pustules, largely dwarfing the issues of the wider world (such as strikes, recession, riots and rising unemployment. Although he’s happy to offer his perspective on those as well).

And affairs of the heart? His heartfelt poetry, devoted to his beloved yet cruelly unattainable classmate Pandora Braithwaite speaks volumes: “Pandora!/ I adore ya/I implore ye/Don't ignore me.”

He is, of course, Adrian Albert Mole, of Mangold Avenue, Leicester.