AUDIO books are stealing the ears of listeners who might once have been radio listeners; so the BBC has invested a laudable tranche of its resources into high-end literary adaptations. Impressive in this regard has been the Dickensian season (Radio 4, Sundays), which opened with a digest of Hard Times, and is currently working its way through Little Dorrit on its way to Our Mutual Friend.

Once upon a time, such grand novels were afforded eight or ten one-hour episodes. Now, the production team must manage with just three. And they approach the challenge as librarians do when they find their place of work ablaze: what items, what characters, what scenes do they save from the burning edifice?

Even the name of the production company responsible for Little Dorrit — Reduced Listening Ltd — acknowledges the compromises forced on them by our dwindling attention spans. We cannot blame them; and Mike Walker’s reduction, realised by an excellent sound-design team and director, is more than adequate for what is required.

It is never easy, in radio drama, to keep in play a large dramatis personae but not to make the listener lose the plot. There are only so many refinements of Cockney and Gentlemanly that the ear can distinguish, and Walker obeys something like The Archers’ law of complexity, by not deploying more than six characters in close proximity.

For those who like to know what to listen out for in advance, each episode comes with an essay by John York (Opening Lines, Radio 4, Sundays), analogous to those erudite introductions to the Penguin Classics series. Thus, we learn that Little Dorrit is all about imprisonment: by walls, by money, and by bureaucracy. Correctly described as Kafkaesque — for Kafka knew the novel — the Circumlocution Office is peopled by classic Dickens types, which lift off the airwaves as they do off the page. It is with them that new readers of Dickens will get hooked; and, if these productions encourage us back to the originals, then they have done an invaluable service. So long as the Beeb has the resources to do it, may it continue to make radio like this.

We don’t nowadays bang up a debtor in the Marshalsea Prison, as was the fate both of William Dorrit and Dickens’s father. Indeed, the thrust of The Bottom Line (Radio 4, 10 October), in which Evan Davis examined the economics of debt collection, was that it is a high-minded business. “Credit management”, they prefer to call it, involving “customer” and “clients” rather than defaulters and loan-sharks.

For once, it was the young whippersnapper, the founder of a company that uses AI to interact with customers, who came up with the most sympathetic contribution. After some banter about the myriad creative ways used to avoid paying up, he reminded us that most people are just a divorce, redundancy, or health crisis away from debt.