The Diary of a Nobody the first, "The Diary of a Somebody", is a direct reference to the Grossmith original. Reviewing this volume in "The Spectator", Benny Green points out several parallels with the original, in both character and event. Matthew's book, says Green, is amusing, but the Grossmiths' book is superior; it is "affecting as well as comical, in a way that the Matthew pastiche is not". In 1982 came the first appearance of Sue Townsend's teenage creation, Adrian Mole, whose passage into young manhood and early middle age is charted in a long series of diaries. The more middle-aged he becomes, says Morton,
The Diary of a Nobody more than 15 million copies in 40 countries. In the 1990s the satirical magazine "Private Eye" lampooned John Major, British prime minister 1990–97, in "The Secret Diary of John Major aged 47", a hybrid of the Adrian Mole diaries with "The Diary of a Nobody", which made much fun of Major's lower-middle class origins. The social historian James Hammerton defines "Pooterism" as "the dependent weakness and inflated social pretension of white-collar workers, constructed in the workplace but expressed just as powerfully at home". Jon Wilde of "The Guardian" observes this characteristic in a number of British TV comedy creations of