Michael Billington on Sue Townsend: 'Plays poured out of her'
On stage, the diary-writing teenager Adrian Mole was a joy because Townsend was serious about her single-parent hero and funny about everything elseI first came across Sue Townsend in 1979. Backed by the Phoenix theatre, Leicester, she'd submitted a play to the Thames Television Playwrights' Scheme (now run by Channel 4) on whose panel I sat. The play, Womberang, was set in a gynaecological waiting-room, was palpably…