Mary Linwood Comprehensive School the former Mary Linwood Secondary School. The principal sponsor of this Academy is the Church of England. The Council transferred the site of the former secondary school (Mary Linwood) to the sponsors. Samworth, Leicester's first City Academy, was built on the site of the old Mary Linwood school and completed in September, 2007. The children of author Sue Townsend attended the school during the late 1970s and early 1980s; their experiences influenced her highly successful Adrian Mole books. "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole" was reputedly based on Sue Townsend's son's experiences at the school. Several of the teachers who
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