During the height of Beatlemania you could buy Beatles chewing gum. It cost twice as much as competing brands, but it was worth it. Not only did you get an exclusive colour picture of the Fabs, but the colours were brighter, the taste better and more varied. Or so we thought. As with their music, the impression was given that Beatles gum was a superior product. Care had been taken.

The producer Dirk Maggs is the radio comedy equivalent of Beatles gum. Others may be content with doing a competent job of translating the written word to recorded sound, but Maggs goes farther. Nothing comes out of his studio, you feel, that has not been buffed and shone to the limit.

Already the producer of the last three adaptations of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy oeuvre, last year he turned to the mystical, magical and bizarrely hilarious (that’s as in bizarre and funny, rather than surprisingly funny) Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It starred Harry Enfield as the New Age sleuth with an amazing amount of blackness behind the courteous exterior, and it was a joy.

And now it’s back. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is the second of Adams’s Dirk Gently trilogy (he died before he could complete the third), and its six-part adaptation, by Maggs and John Langdon, begins on Thursday (Radio 4, 11pm).

Here we find Gently, who has fallen on hard times, dressed as a Gypsy woman and using his clairvoyant powers to read palms. Then a frantic client turns up with a frankly ludicrous story about being stalked by a goblin waving a contract, and accompanied by a hairy, green-eyed, scythe-wielding monster. How can one resist?

Of course, some probably will. “Comedy sci-fi?” they will scoff, and put it aside in favour of an early night. More fool them.

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