 During his investigation, Gently encounters exploding airport check-in counters, the gods of Norse mythology, insulting horoscopes, a sinister nursing home, a rhino-phagic eagle, an I Ching calculator (to which everything calculated above the value of 4 is apparently 'a suffusion of yellow'), a god who gives his powers to a lawyer and an advertising executive in exchange for clean linen, and an attractive American woman who gets angry when she can't get pizza delivered in London.A BBC radio adaptation, "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul", starring Harry Enfield, Peter Davison, John Fortune and Stephen Moore was broadcast on October 2008.