Woman's Hour - Nicole Hockley, Juliet Stevenson, Women protesting in Iran, Sue Townsend's legacy

Episode Date: October 15, 2022

Nicole Hockley lost her son Dylan when he was 6 years old, during the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut in 2012. She talks about her son, her feelings of loss, her activism and her reaction to the trial of Alex Jones, where a jury decided he should pay nearly 1 billion dollars in damages. Do you feel comfortable voicing your opinion? Are you afraid of the ‘cancel culture’? Actress Juliet Stevenson is in a new play that address the issue of differing opinions in the modern world – she explains why she thinks we’ve lost free speech in this country.Women in Iran are continuing to protest in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini. Iranian women have a strong history of protesting – author Kamin Mohammidi discusses.This week marks 40 years of Sue Townsend’s ‘The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole’. English Professor Emma Parker and writer Cathy Rentzenbrink join us to talk about the enduring legacy of Adrian Mole.Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Lottie Garton

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Hello and welcome to Weekend Woman's Hour. Your chance to hear our carefully curated best bits from the week just gone. Coming up, the actress Juliet Stevenson and what she sees as the loss of free speech in this country. Whatever happened to the phrase agreeing to disagree? You know, we're now living in a culture where people are scared to say what they think for fear of, you know, violent opposition or being criticised or at worst cancelled.

We seem to be losing freedom of speech, even freedom of thought. And I think there is a sort of collective grief about that. Why the current protests in Iran are different to those that have happened in the past and what that could mean, plus the legacy of the great author Sue Townsend and her book The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, which is 40 years old this week. That'll age you. Put the kettle on and settle in. But first, this week in a defamation trial in the United States, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in

damages. He'd falsely claimed that a mass shooting in 2012, where 20 young children between the ages of six and seven and six adults were shot dead at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut was a hoax. He argued for years that the parents of those who were killed were crisis actors and that it was a staged government plot to take guns from America. Nicole Hockley's six-year-old son Dylan was killed in the shooting. She was part of the defamation case and is also the co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise, which works to protect children from gun violence. I spoke to her on Friday and began by asking whether she feels justice has been done. I mean, justice is a big question. But overall, when it comes to what Alex Jones has been doing to us and his followers have been doing to us for the last 10

years, and the fact that this is still going on today and will continue going on tomorrow, there is a sense of justice because the jury really heard what we were saying and took that to heart. The harm that's been done, the distress that's been done over the last 10 years to my family, to all the other families, and the fact that he's now being held to account for it, that definitely does feel like justice is prevailing here rather than continuing this nightmare and allowing it to continue to happen. What was the impact of his lies over the 10 years on you and the other families? You know, it's funny, a lot of people through the trial have said that they just didn't realise how bad it was because I think, I know I kept so much

hidden from my friends and family, but it really changed everything about you in terms of being hyper-vigilant of everything around you. Because there would be comments on social media, and that's one thing. In every single video we would put up of our son would have hundreds of horrible, vile comments about him, about myself, about Ian, my ex-husband. And it was very overwhelming. So we just stopped putting up videos of our son. But then also, I started to get a lot of mail to our house. And I often got the mail before Ian got home. So I would collect it all and receive and read through

the death threats. People telling me I needed to slit my wrists before they came and did it for me, sending me pictures of dead children, because they said as a crisis actress, I had no idea what a dead child looked like because my son was never even alive, never mind, never even dying. And it was very, you just never knew who was around you and who wasn't. And, you know, there was one person who harassed me and harassed others who did go to jail that I know of. And there's probably more out there. I know that the volume of people that did this is much larger than I will ever know. But it became very scary about you never know which person around you could take their words and turn them into actions. So it's

been very scary these last 10 years. And you were grieving for your child at the time when all of this was happening and having to deal with this horrendous attacks on you. So how much did his lies compound your grief? They truly did because it's hard to, I mean, I was already grieving in public and I'm still grieving. You know, every day I grieve, Dylan. But the fact that you then don't know, OK, if you grieve, then someone's going to be attacking you. If you don't cry enough, someone's going to be saying you're an actress because you don't cry. If you cry too much, they're saying, oh, she did a good job today in her acting. She's really earning her government payout.

It's impossible to just be a mom whose son was taken from me far too early because I'm constantly afraid of what are people looking at me for? And is there someone dangerous out there who's thinking that I'm a traitor, that I'm creating treason against the country, that it's impossible to just be. He took that away from me and he took that ability away for me to truly just be a mom who misses her son. And feel safe, you and the other families. Safety is huge and constantly having to worry about my surviving son and how is he going to react when hoaxers come for him. Yeah, that's Jake, your other son, who was also in school that day.

He was at the school, yeah. How have you been able to shield him from all of this? Well, he's 18 now. He was eight when this happened. So for a number of years, I was able to shield him. And I realized, I believe it was in 2017, that I realized I had not done as good a job at shielding him as I thought. By then, he was on his phone. He was looking at social media. He was reading things. And I overheard him talking to a friend and he mentioned Alex Jones's name. And he said, there's this horrible person out there saying these things. And I have never had that conversation with Jake. And as a mom, I felt that I had somehow failed because he should hear about these things

from his parents, not from scrolling news sites. And we have had conversations since then. I've been very, very transparent and very honest with him because he needs to understand the world around him so that he's best prepared for it and try to and I've been trying to help him make you know a good decision so that when he's at college now or in his life if someone comes up to him that he knows how to deal with a bully or knows how to walk away and not not engage directly if it's unsafe to do so. And Dylan was just six when he died. Can you tell us about him?

What kind of boy was he? Dylan was, he was really the centre of our universe and our family because he was the youngest, but he was also autistic. So we had to learn a lot about that spectrum disorder and understand how he was receiving the world and how, what sounds and smells and textures meant to him so that we could better understand and prepare him for things. And, but he was just, he was always laughing and smiling. And I was very fortunate that he was a deep cuddler. So he always wanted to cuddle and hold on to me. He would kind of just, even at six, sometimes he

would just kind of sit on my hip and hold me close. He had a very sing-songy type of voice and people just loved to hear him laugh. I mean, he could be difficult sometimes, but what six-year-old boy isn't difficult? And I miss him all the time. I miss some of the funny things he would do. He used to look at the moon every night because he just loved to look at it, and he he loved storms it's storming here today in Newtown Connecticut and he used to um he used to love looking at the lightning even though the thunder scared him um so he was just a very special little boy and important to hear that important to talk about him it is because he because he is still alive in my heart and soul.

And my job is to keep his legacy alive so that people don't forget him. And you really are, Nicole, doing such great work. You've set up, since the shooting, Sandy Hook Promise, which is working to protect children from gun violence. I want to know, though, at what point you were able to make the decision that you were going to do something proactive. Like, where in the grieving process, how did you react as a community, and at what point did you decide that this is what you were going to do? Yeah, I was fortunate that while I was still in my bed that night, there were community members gathering on December 14th, 2012, saying we need to do something. And there was one man in particular, Lee, who said, no, we're not rhetorically saying we need to do something.

We really do need to do something. And they started convening and meeting and thinking about what that would be. I didn't hear about that group of community members till shortly after Christmas and started meeting with them. They'd reached out to all the impacted families. And I was very interested because my DNA is I have to do something. It's just who I am. I'm very driven. And when I mean, we spoke about change at Dylan's memorial service, which was one week after the shooting. And I said, I had no idea what this change was going to be, but something good was going to come from this. You can't have this event happen. Twenty six beautiful people die. My son and nothing change as a result. So when I met with the community members and they said, you know, we're creating a platform for you to advocate for the changes that you want to see. I said, absolutely. That is something I want to be part of.

And then I helped formally launch Sandy Hook Promise just one month after the shooting. And this has been my journey for the last 10 years and will be my mission for the rest of my life to keep other families and other children safe. How important was that community? Community is everything. And I didn't really have a lot of deep roots in the community by the time the tragedy happened. I had been living in England for 18 years. My husband's British. And the kids were both born there, Dylan and Jake. And we had only moved to Newtown, Connecticut in 2011 that was critical because I don't know that I could have done this by myself. I mean, you really do need to get help from others to get started, especially when your world is completely falling apart and the ground doesn't even feel solid underneath your feet.

You do need to rely on community. I read somewhere that you said you barely remember the first year. I definitely have a very Swiss cheese memory of that first year. I have moments of, you know, extreme clarity from 12, 14, from the year after. And then I have moments that sometimes a photograph will come up even now on a on a news stream or something and I'll be like oh my gosh I'd forgotten all about that and and there are still some things that I think I you know I still get confused was that 2013 14 15 and it's different from I mean we all forget things but it's very different in terms of there are periods of time

that I can't really recall exactly what was going on. Sure. Now you say you want, you know, one month after you knew that you wanted change. So as we said, you set up the Sandy Hook Promise and you're working to ensure a future where children are free from shootings and acts of violence in schools and in homes and their communities. But we still regularly hear about school shootings. So what progress is being made, Nicole? Yeah. And sadly, death by firearm is now the number one cause of death for children under the age of 19 in America. It's surpassed car crashes. And that shows how messed up we are as a country, really. The proliferation of guns is extreme. There's more guns than people here and not as many regulations as there need to be. But there has been progress. And I focus on those bright spots.

I know for a fact that the programs that we do with Sandy Hook Promise and the education that we provide to kids has already stopped at a minimum 11 school shooting plots. So I know that there's 11 communities that you're not hearing about in the news because we're able to get ahead of it and stop kids. And when I think about Jake, I think about his peers, and I think about this, these last 10 years, there is a generation of youth here who really all they've known in their school years is how to prepare for an active shooter, how to practice for when it happens. And you hear in the news afterwards, they all, after a shooting, many of them will be saying, I was wondering when our school would be next. That's heartbreaking for anyone to hear. But when I think about what that's done to that generation, they are poised for change because

they are not going to let this continue. It's really hard to hear that. And for our British audience, so, so difficult to understand because the right to bear arms, it just doesn't exist here, but so fundamental to America. Do you think that will ever change? Probably not in my lifetime. But I would hope is that, you know, like any amendment in the Constitution, there has to be a practical application of it. And I think we have some very extreme views of what the Second Amendment is right now. And there have already been, you know, restrictions within that amendment. You can't have a machine gun, for example. So I think having responsible and appropriate access to guns, practicing safe storage,

that in itself, you know, if you want to have a gun, great. Keep it locked up when it's not in use. Keep the ammunition separate. That would help so much with so many suicides, not only, and school shootings, because the guns all come from the homes. But this is a cultural problem that we have in America, And we're incredibly divided as a country right now. And my last question, Nicole, because this must be such a difficult time for you. How are you? How are you doing? Depends on the day and the minute within the day. Today, I am OK. Thank you.

And broadly speaking, 10 years on, I have my path. I know what I'm doing and I know how to do it. Jake's in a good place. I'm okay, but I would, if I could go back to 12, 14 and not send my son to school that day, I would do so in an instant. Nicole Hockley, whose six-year-old son Dylan was killed 10 years ago in the Sandy Hook school shooting.

Now to the actress Juliet Stevenson. Presently starring in The Doctor in London's West End, where it's receiving rave reviews, the play tackles a mountain of issues, including medical ethics, politics and anti-Semitism. When Juliet's character, Dr Ruth Wolfe, prevents a priest seeing a 14-year-old girl dying from a self-administered

abortion, the incident goes viral on social media, provoking petitions and TV debates and pitting medicine against religion. Well, Juliette spoke to Emma about a whole range of things from our trust in doctors today to Juliette's passion for the trapeze. But one of the things that many of you got in touch about was the conversation around opinions and social media culture. Juliet started by explaining to Emma what her role in the play is. She's not a moral heroine. She's not the heroine of the play. She is the protagonist, but it's not that she's right and everybody else is wrong. By no, no means. I mean, what the play brilliantly does is that you see this incident near the beginning of the show

and then it's like a sort of prison that keeps turning and you see a different facet of this story different repercussions different resonances and because it's cast that the show is cast the way it is where people are cast against their type so we mix up gender we mix up race ethnicity sexual orientation and so on so people in the audience don't quite know the identities of the actors of the characters rather until they're they're revealed as the show goes on. So people are judging, the audience are judging these events without quite knowing. They don't have that clarity, that certainty of knowing that she's a woman, you know, he's black, he's white, he's, you know, they're judging something just on the basis of the events and what is said and done. And then they discover later, you know, what those identities are. So it's a fantastically playful and theatrical way of looking at how we assess and judge things and how we react based on identity. Just one more on another big theme which is in there, because I'm also thinking about what the country has been through, which is grief. You know, grief is running throughout this whole play.

Your character's grieving. The family of the girl is grieving. And I wonder, I know you've also had personal experience very recently as a family of grief, as many have. You may wish to talk about that, may not. But I wonder for you how it was to do this play at this time. Yes, well, we first did this show in 2019 and we're about to take it into the West End when lockdown happened. So there's been two and a half years since we it's been waiting to come back into the West End. And yes, in that time, we have lost two members of our family, very, very, you know, which so and we've all the whole country has been through this extraordinary period, which, as you say, includes a lot of grief. I mean, my so it's been extraordinary to come back to it. My mum died earlier this year of dementia,

and my character in the play is researching a cure for Alzheimer's and her own partner has died of Alzheimer's. So there are strange personal resonances. But I think much more importantly, it's a play. I mean, you can feel a sort of hunger coming off audiences, who I think are perhaps or have experienced a kind of grief. And it's not necessarily for lost loved ones, although it may well be. I think it's also a real grief for the loss of community, for the loss of being able to share points of view. You know, I mean, whatever happened to the phrase agreeing to disagree? You know, we're now living in a culture where people are scared to say what they think for fear of, you know, violent opposition or being criticized or at worst cancelled. We seem to be losing freedom of speech, even freedom of thought.

And I think there is a sort of collective grief about that. You know, where are our communities? When we were going to the pub, the youth centre, the library, when we had high streets where people would bump into each other, our communities were actual. And you could live alongside people who were not the same faith or not the same opinion, and we muddled along together. And now most of our communities are online, or many of them are,

and we tend to sort of settle into a community online that shares our point of view. And therefore, we become extremely hostile to other points of view. And that's really a very, very corrosive and terrifying development, I think. And I think that audiences come into this theatre hungry for the opportunity to hear all points of view in safety, you know, at no risk to themselves? What do you mean in safety? Well, because they come into the theatre and all these points of view can be aired in a theatre, in the dark, collectively together. It doesn't cost them anything.

It's not any risk to them. But they can hear these points of view being aired, and then they leave, and there's this incredible debate. I mean, I meet people on the street after the show, desperate to talk about it, with completely different responses and opinions to what they've seen. You know, it's thrilling. It's so exciting. Do you feel in your life that people are not sharing their views anymore? Yeah, absolutely. People are scared to talk about all sorts of things, both to do with personal

identity or in the world, you know, because of the fear of repercussions, of being condemned, of being. And while it's very important to learn how to respect all, you know, every single, you know, member of this country's population, it's also very important that we learn how to live alongside difference and otherness and people who we don't agree with. And so you think in the two years of the delay, which was, of course, impacted again by the pandemic with this place, that bit's got more relevant? I do think so. I mean, you know, we can all name people who have suffered from cancel culture. And I think that, you know, people being

destroyed because of a point of view is something we should be looking at and questioning perhaps. Has it made you no longer, I mean, you've been a campaigner, you are involved with activism. Has it made you think twice about putting your head above the power? Yes, of course. Of course it does. I mean, if I feel I'm too scared to say something, I check why I'm scared. And then I think, okay, well, I don't want to be frightened of that. So I made a decision to speak up anyway, or I may not. But of course, because, you know, I mean, I left Twitter, you know, I couldn't stand it any longer.

And yeah, and I think many people feel that. I mean, I'm only looking at the headlines this week, of course, JK Rowling, her response to sharing her views about policies, for instance, designed with trans people in mind. Some people won't even say her name. But the reason she's back in the headlines this week is rarely this happens,

but Tom Felton, who played Malfoy in Harry Potter, says he feels no one has single-handedly done more for bringing joy to so many different generations than Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling actually said that. We've got to a place now where if you've even worked with somebody where they have a view that might not be yours or might be different, people are no longer mentioning them. I mean, in the arts, it's a very strange time. It is a very strange

time. I mean, I think, you know, we, this country is a multicultural country, multi-faith. We've been that way for a long time now. And I think that freedom of speech is something that we have to really, really treasure. If you look around the world, increasingly autocratic, despotic, brutal regimes are coming into power where freedom of speech is absolutely impossible. We have it in this country and we have to fight for it and we must not be destroying it ourselves. We must cherish it.

We must cherish all of our national institutions and cultural values. You know, freedom of speech is a very, very precious thing and you only have to look at people. I mean, I've had a Belarusian refugee in my house. He, you know, he had to leave his country, he would be imprisoned and tortured if he gave his opinion on that appalling regime. So I live, you know, somebody's been living in our house, whose life would be at risk if he voiced his opinion. He's come to this country where he can say whatever he likes. We have to we have to cherish that, I think. And I think the play is an exploration of it's a sort of reminder, I think, to everybody that, you know, that it's I think the theatricality of the experience is that everybody comes into that theater, sits down in the dark and they can safely see all those points of view explored and they can have strong feelings and responses, which they do according to who they are,

whether they're Jewish or Catholic or white or black or whatever. But it's safe to do so, you know, and I think that's why this play is offering quite a unique experience. The brilliant Juliet Stevenson there talking to Emma about her new play, The Doctor, which is on now at the Duke of York Theatre in London. And so many of you got in touch with your comments on the current culture around free speech. Here are just a few. Natalie said,

Such sense from Juliet. Yes, we are grieving communities and lamenting free speech. A pleasure to hear her. And Julie said, Thank you, Juliet, for saying what so many of us feel about free speech and the right to express our views. The mark of an educated person should be that they can listen to reasoned debate, not try to shut down others' opinions because they

don't agree. And this one from Leslie. It was so heartening to have someone speaking up in defence of free speech and how social media has made us an intolerant and toxic society. And if you'd like to comment, then get in touch with us via social media it's at bbc woman's hour still to come on the program why sue townsend's the secret diary of adrian mole gives you a different message each time you read it and some of your diary revelations and remember you can enjoy woman's hour any hour of the day if you can't join us live at 10 a.m during the week all you need to do is head to bbc woman's hour on BBC Sounds. Now, this week has seen more protests in Iran and around the world following weeks of dissent over the death of Masa Amini,

a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, last month. The protesters, mainly young girls, now seem to have a bigger agenda with their rallying cry of women, life, freedom being heard in rallies all over Iran. Karmeen Mohammadi is an Iranian-British author and journalist, and she spoke to Jessica about her reaction to the scenes from the protests. It's extraordinary. We've never seen anything like this. You know, personally, of course, I think like any human watching some of these videos,

I can't help but be devastated by them, you know, because these young girls, the young people, it's not just women who are literally putting their bodies physically on the line in order to ask for the simplest, simplest things, the basic human rights of the right to equality, the right to choose how to dress, how to live. So my response is I'm devastated. I'm grief stricken. I'm disgusted. And of course, there's some sense behind all of that of excitement is not the right word, but we're watching closely because this is this is very different to the protests that have come before. What is it that these young women want, these protesters want? What are they protesting for? So the hijab, which is the...

Iran has Sharia law and has had since 1979 after the revolution when the Islamic Republic was implemented. Now, women are required to cover their hair and their bodies in public. They generally wear a loose coat and a headscarf. There can be many interpretations of this. Sporadically, they restrict these much more. And this is what we've seen happening in the last couple of months. Now, this, the protest started against, in protest of the death of Massa Jinnah Amini. She is a Kurdish woman, Jinnah is her Kurdish name. But it can't be registered in Iran, because there is widespread,

of course, discrimination inside Iran against ethnic, Iranian ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds, the Baluchis. So what the protesters started off saying, why they burnt their headscarves was in solidarity, was in protest and was by saying we could all be Jinnah, we could all be Mahsa, Jinnah, Mahsa, Amini. This could happen to any of us. Her bad hijab was not particularly bad. She was quite modestly dressed. She was not from Tehran. She's from Saqqez, which is my paternal homeland, funnily enough. It's in a small town in the far western province of Kurdistan. So this chant that we hear, women, life, freedom, this was actually a Kurdish freedom slogan for the right of equality, freedom for this ethnic minority and centering, as the Kurdish struggle always does, women, women's equality at the center of it. This has become the rallying cry

throughout the nation, throughout all of the protests. But we've soon gone from the demand for this freedom to choose the hijab, because this is not anti-Islamic. This is not anti, you know, the hijab per se. This is anti-state repression. And this headscarf has been used, you know, this is a symbol of devotion in Islam, has been used as a tool for state oppression of half of the population of Iran for 43 years now. So the protesters started to show their hair. They were shaving,

they were cutting their hair in protest because they were saying, okay, if our hair is the problem, we'll get rid of it. You know, this was a big sign of dissent. But the chants go on now. This generation, these young people, these protesters are no longer saying we want just to have the hijab laws changed. They're saying we want rid of the Islamic Republic. They're really saying enough, enough abuse, enough. And these recent protests were sparked, as you say, by the death of Massar Amini. But there's actually been quite a rich history of women protesting in Iran, going back all the way to the revolution of 1979.

What can you tell us about that? Well, you know what, Jessica, we could go right back to the 1850s if we want to start talking about women protesting against their status in society. But, you know, that's for another day. The Iranian revolution, when it happened in 1979, women were there alongside men. You know, this was not an Islamic revolution to begin with. This was very much students, activists, socialists. And there were different factions involved. Women were there alongside. One of the charts of that revolution, which is still going on, is there are no human rights without women's rights. Women then were adopting the hijab and the chador as a sign of protest against this rapidly secularized society, Westernized. Now, what then happened is when Ayatollah Khomeini came in in 1979 and he instituted an Islamic republic and called his government and subsequent governments God's own government.

The very first, I wanted to introduce mandatory hijab. The very first protest, women's protest, was three weeks after Khomeini came and took power in 1979. And there are pictures you can find all over the Internet of women because they were told that they had to, women going to work had to wear headscarves because it was now mandatory in a place of work. And so the next day, women did not go to work. They did a strike and they instead took to the streets and protested. Women have been protesting since the very beginning of the Islamic Republic. And the fact that women in Iran, even within this regime, enjoy actually some more rights in the Middle East than a lot of our sisters, let's say even in places like Saudi, is because of the women's movement,

is because women in Iran have been so active to push the boundaries to keep protecting their rights. Before the revolution, Iranian women were protected by the Family Act of the Family Law of 1975, which is the most progressive in the region. You know, equal rights to divorce. Marriage age was 18. Women could hold positions of power all the way to being high court judges. The very first thing that Khomeini's government did on taking power was repeal these laws. So they took women's marriage age from 18 down to nine. So I think women in Iran have been really clear that at the center of this revolutionary Islamic Republic has been extreme straight oppression of women, their bodies, and how they can take public space. And the fact that women actually do have rights

in Iran, they've pushed the marriage age up to 13, is testament to the power of the women's movement. And do you feel as though this will bring about lasting change? I think a lot of people felt that the protest might die down, but that it really does show no signs of slowing down. Will this bring about a lasting change? I wish I had the answer to that. I wish I knew, you know, and I wish I could speak to that. I can't. I don't know. We're going to have to see. All I can tell you is that, yes, it's different to other protests.

You know, there have been big uprisings in 2009, in 2017, in 2019. And we've had men come alongside the women, men putting on hijab in solidarity with the women. And this is different because this is not trying to negotiate with the regime. It's not trying to change this from the inside. And this is a real spontaneous grassroots kind of explosion of anger, of fury. So it does feel different. Yes, they're not dying down. We're now in the fourth week. Every day that it goes on, I suppose we start to think that perhaps something more lasting will come out of it. It's very, very hard to look to the future. The Islamic regime is very entrenched. They're're very powerful and as we see on these videos um that we that come out of iran they're really not shy about you know uh just shooting in cold blood into unarmed people into their protesters you know we now have school girls

school children on the streets joining these protests and these school children are being arrested they're being taken they're being beaten know, the average age of people being arrested right now is 15. So I don't know what change can come out of this, but I wish I could tell. But it's very hard to think that Iran, the people, the regime can remain the same after this. Karmeen Mohammadi speaking to Jessica about the women protesting in Iran. Now, can you believe it? It's been 40 years since The Secret Diary of Adrian Moll,

aged 13 and three quarters by Sue Townsend, came out. This week, a brand new edition was published with an introduction by the author, Katlin Moran. In case you've forgotten or haven't read the book, on New Year's Day 1981, Adrian is living in Leicester.

His parents' relationship is rocky, money is tight, he's worried about his spots and the length of his penis, and he yearns for Pandora, who is from the posh part of town. Sue Townsend sadly died in 2014, but her legacy lives on, largely through Adrian Moll. To talk more about this, Emma spoke to the writer Cathy Rensenbrink and Dr Emma Parker, an Associate Professor of English at Leicester University, who started by explaining why she loved the book so much.

Well, I read The Secret Diary of Adrian Moll when it was first published. I'm probably about the same age as Adrian. And I enjoyed it. I laughed a lot. It it was very funny but I returned to the novel as an academic in the context of teaching a module called the Thatcher Factor the 1980s in literature and when I reread it as an adult wow suddenly I realized it was a completely different novel and what I saw was not just a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the 1980s, but a really smart and acerbic satire on faturism. Cathy, did you see that? Well, not when I was 11. I read it for the first time and didn't quite get all the jokes. I was giggling with my friend over Adrian measuring his thing.

Equally already, very worried about my own spots. Extremely preoccupied. You know, I really did think the world was going to end if I had to go to school with a spot and would rather, you know, would rather, would rather anything happen than a sort of a fresh spot in the morning. So, but I've definitely had the same experience as Emma, as that I loved it then. I revisit it every so often. And whenever I revisit it, I just see it from a whole other level and because I'm now older than Adrian's parents even and I think it's an incredibly acute and compassionate vision of a marriage struggling under the weight of unemployment and being attracted to other people it's a funny thing isn't it well I was also gonna say it's a funny thing when you get older than the characters I remember recently watching a

rerun of Friends and being older now than Friends when I originally watched it. Yeah, when you age past and then you see it from a different perspective. Emma, do you think that's why? Because you can come to it and see so many different parts of it at different stages that it's continued. It's not just about its success at the time, that it's continued to have an appeal. Yeah, definitely. I mean, Sue Townsend said she wrote the novel for adults and particularly for women. And I now see it as a feminist novel, which I didn't see when I was a teenager. In what way? Well, it's a really sympathetic critique of masculinity.

I mean, it exposes male feelings, right? It's significant that it's a secret diary. And the epigraph from Lawrence in the opening about the character, Paul not being able to talk about his feelings, tells us that boys struggle with that. But here is Sue Townsend blowing that open and showing us male vulnerability and male insecurities in order to challenge the myth of male superiority, which Adrian himself believes in, right? Adrian has some very conservative views of gender,

which are amusingly satirised. So it's a satire on masculinity and male dominance, but the novel also has some amazingly strong female characters um pauline pandora and grandma i mean i love the scene where grandma beats up barry kent the school bully and gets back adrian's uh the money that he's extracted from adrian with um with menaces and um one of my favorite lines is um pauline mum, does a self-defence class. And Adrian writes, my father says that women ought to be at home cooking. He said it in a whisper so that he wouldn't be karate chopped to death. Cathy, do you connect to it in this way, that feminist way in now?

Very much so. And I think, you know, so I've reread it several times. I reread it this morning just before coming on air, just was flicking through. I found yet another bit that made me think of things in a different way, which was that because my son's now 13. And the other day after I was having a disaster, you know, full of cold, I had an exploding hot water bottle at her burnt face. He made me a cup of tea without asking and it made me cry. And what do I find in Adrian Moore this morning after talking about his mother he says today I made her a cup of tea without asking and it made her cry you can't please some people and I thought that's the power of it she's so incredibly acute across all the people but I think it's really compassionate and I think sometimes for me the

limitations of satire as a reader is I think satire, it can be a bit one note. Once you've got the point, you've got the joke. And also, I think satire can be quite cruel. And I'm just not I just I just can't be bothered. I just feel I'm too old for cruelty in literature. I see enough of it in the world. But every time I read Adrian Mole, I think is so compassionate. It's really kind of like holding the space for Adrian to be worried about his spots for it to be okay he just wants his mum to wear the lurex apron he bought her and stay at home and making vitamin c drinks she wants to go off to Greenham Common and maybe have a lover and in the book somehow it just holds the space for everyone to want what they want um and I think that's probably why it's so strong and and writing it Emma from a boy's as you say. And writing it, Emma, from a boy's, as you say, boy's point of view.

Yeah, from a boy's point of view. And, you know, even today, you know, there's these debates about mental health and encouraging boys to talk about their feelings. And, you know, she was way ahead of the game, both in terms of her satire on satirism and her critique of masculinity. I mean, I really think that the novel hasn't had its due critically. Sue Townsend is hugely loved. The novel was really popular.

But it's fascinating that there's no biography of Sue Townsend and there's no critical book about her work. And I think that one of the reasons for that is because she writes comic fiction and comic fiction isn't really taken very seriously particularly when women write it so Sue herself told a story about going into hospital in the early 1980s and the nurse who fitted her with an identity bracelet said to her oh how embarrassing to have the same names that woman who writes those silly books. Really? And she had anxieties about being seen as a proper writer.

And she feared receiving letters from readers telling her that she should give up writing and go back to the biscuit factory. And she said, you know, well, I can't do that because I just look terrible in a hairnet. I mean, that's something that, I mean, it's interesting, obviously that was presumably before amazon but i you know writers just should not read their amazon reviews and should not read letters from people telling them that they're rubbish because everybody does that to everybody all the time yes but i mean do you agree though that perhaps sue hasn't had the critical attention

she does i think that there's there's i don't really fully understand why it is I think people that comic writing tends to not get taken very seriously whereas for me I think comic writing is kind of the best writing because I think with Samuel Beckett that nothing is funnier than unhappiness. The author Cathy Retzenbrink there talking to Emma about the legacy of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole alongside Dr Emma Parker and this prompted loads of you to get in touch about your own diaries and the secrets that lie within them. Here's a message from Nicky, she says I've kept a diary on and off since

I was about five. First entry was about seeing Mr Pastry mother read my diary when I was 14, a description of what I was doing with a boy I'd met in Tunbridge Teen and Twenty Club. I had to pretend I'd made it up. Classic excuse.

Sue in Chichester emailed saying, I started a diary the day after I retired. I do it to capture every day. I didn't want to lose days, but make sure each one had something special, worthy of calling to mind. And this one from Erica. I've kept a diary for the last 50 years. It's my companion,

confessional and entertainment. And I particularly relied on it heavily during the last two COVID restrictive years. I write it for myself and not for anyone else to read. However, if I become incapable and in a nursing home, I'd want my carer to read some of the juicier bits to me as a reminder of my earlier life. How nice. That's it from me. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Don't forget to tune in to Woman's Hour on Monday with Jessica Crichton. She'll be speaking to director Thea Khan about her new powerful documentary, Behind the Rage. I'm off to write in my diary. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies.

I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service,

The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.