The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (radio serial)

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is an Above the Title Productions radio adaptation, dramatised by Dirk Maggs and John Langdon of Douglas Adams's The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Starring Harry Enfield, Peter Davison, John Fortune and Stephen Moore, it started broadcasting on 2 October 2008 on BBC Radio 4.

The title is a quotation from the Adams novel Life, The Universe and Everything, where it says of the immortally annoyed Wowbagger:

...it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in ... as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul...

In adapting the story for six half-hour episodes, Dirk Maggs has rescheduled the novel's convoluted plot:

The challenge was to retain Douglas's mischievous delight in strewing barrel loads of red herrings across the path of his detective story - all of which prove to be vital clues to its solution

The adaptation is an inverted detective story, shuffling the importance of characters: elevating the Draycotts, turning Neil Sharp into Kate Schechter's landlord and former Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo member with the now returned Richard McDuff. Cleaner Elena is inadvertently kidnapped by Nobby the Pawnbroker, after the battle with a ravenous fridge.

On the audio trailer, Susan Way sells Way Forward Technologies to Sirius Cybernetics, Richard McDuff is detained by the Vogon catchphrase "resistance is useless", and the I-Ching Calculator has the 'Guide activation' sound, and is obtained from Nobby.

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