I 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 the fruit of long experience and was uproariously funny. We not only gave Sue the £2,000 bursary, we later invited her to join the panel. We also set her off on what proved to be a prolific and highly successful playwriting career.

Plays poured out of Sue in the 1980s. There was Bazaar and Rummage (1983) which was a comedy about agoraphobia; Groping for Words (1983) about illiteracy; and The Great Celestial Cow (1984) which confronted the lives of Asian women in Leicester. But it was with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾, based on her famous book, that Sue really hit the jackpot. After opening in Leicester, it moved to Wyndham's in London where it ran for over two years.

What was it that made the play such a joy? The fact that Sue was serious about her single-parent hero and funny about everything else. You knew you were in good hands from the opening moment when Adrian (originally played by Simon Schatzberger) addressed the audience directly to announce that he'd come all the way to London to hear a sadly cancelled lecture about George Eliot. "I'm doing George Eliot," he told us "for my literature project. I've written him loads of letters but he hasn't replied to one." There was nothing condescending about our laughter. This was simply Sue highlighting the earnestness of her young east Midland Pepys.

At a time when everyone is writing plays about the royals, it's also worth recalling that Sue was ahead of the game with The Queen and I. Again based on her own novel, this hilarious 1994 play (with songs by Ian Dury and Mickey Gallagher) imagined what would happen if the dethroned Windsors had to adjust to life on a Leicester housing-estate. What was fascinating was that Elizabeth Windsor soon learned to sew and and cook, even if she angrily kept a visiting social worker at bay. The problems lay with her family: her husband grumpily refused to share a bed and her eldest son was dismayed to discover you couldn't keep a horse in a Hell Close garden. Far from seeming like a piece of republican propaganda, the play actually made the royals endearing. But that says quite a lot about Sue Townsend: she was born with a natural gift for exuberant comedy and, although she'd known hardship, didn't seem to have an unforgiving bone in her body.