Warning: The following will contain spoilers for the majority of the Adrian Mole books. I dont think its any kind of exaggeration to say that the Adrian Mole books shaped my adolescence. I discovered them aged thirteen after being set an essay on a book featuring a love story and being explicitly told by my English teacher that anything Star Wars-related was out of bounds. So venturing to the local library, I was handed a copy of the series second book The Growing Pains Of Adrian Mole. I immediately fell in love with the series, raced through all the books that had been released at that time, and frequently reread the school librarys copies during my lunch breaks and free periods in the years that followed. I identified strongly with a neurotic character like Adrian (especially since I was the same age as him when I first started reading the books), loved the diary format, and was drawn in by both the dry and subtle humour and the ongoing drama of Adrians life. Its an especially brilliant conceit that the books have followed his life from teenager to adult. Every single one of those books was a small masterpiece and a huge impact on me. Except for The True Confessions Of Adrian Albert Mole and Adrian Mole: The Lost Years, which were flawed to say the least. Years later, I discovered the 1985 TV adaptation of the first book and went to great lengths to find the DVD, which (until fairly recently) was only released in Holland. It was well executed with a great cast that included Julie Walters and Beryl Reid with an excellent theme tune by Ian Dury that eventually reached number 45 in the UK charts. It was followed by an adaptation of Growing Pains shortly afterwards and an adaptation of The Cappucino Years (the fifth book in the series set in 1997) in 2001 starring Stephen Mangan as Adrian and Helen Baxendale as his ex-girlfriend Pandora which, sadly, has not yet received a domestic release. Recently, I started thinking. How would I cast an Adrian Mole adaptation? The books were such a massive part of my teenage years and are still firm favourites of mine so Id want to do them justice as well as just casting them competently. For the purposes of this list, Im casting adaptations of the seventh and eighth books: Adrian Mole And The Weapons Of Mass Destruction and Adrian Mole: the Prostrate Years (set from 2002 to 2004 and 2007 to 2010 respectively) as they share a set of characters and havent yet been adapted. Click "next" to see my first casting choice...