Sue Townsend and I were introduced over lunch in a Soho restaurant by the head of drama at Thames Television, Lloyd Shirley, soon after the company acquired the rights to The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ to find out if we two would "hit it off" and could develop this wonderfully entertaining book for television. As luck would have it, the opposite backgrounds of a Hungarian refugee TV director and an English housewife turned writer triggered off a similar sense of humour in the visual interpretation of the story and characters.
During the following few months, I spent three days a week in Leicester, where Sue lived with her family. We worked on her script, and she helped me not just to see the characters but to smell them. We visited locations where she thought I might like to film some of the scenes the way she had visualised them. She was the most helpful writer I have had the privilege of working with.
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