44 Scotland Street: The Blue Spode Tea Cup, adapted by Alexander McCall Smith from his own stories. Dir. David Ian Neville. Perf. Crawford Logan, Carol Ann Crawford, Anita Vettesse. BBC Radio 4, 9-13 Feb. 2015. BBCiPlayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b051rjpk to 15 Mar. 2015.

David Ian Neville's delightfully comic production interweaves two basic plots: Domenica Macdonald (Carol Ann Crawford) enlists the help of painter Angus Lordie (Crawford Logan) to recover a blue Spode tea cup, which she believes has been stolen by her neighbor Irene (Anita Vettesse). Meanwhile Irene tries to sustain a crowded existence, including taking her six-year-old son Bertie (Simon Kerr) to various activities including yoga, while trying to avoid the accusation of being a bad mother (having accidentally abandoned her baby Ulysses outside the local delicatessen. Add to the mix various intriguing subplots, including an incident which might lead to Angus's faithful dog Cyril being destroyed.

The Blue Spode Tea Cup gently pokes fun at people's pretensions, especially those of Irene, who holds certain deeply-held beliefs about child-rearing that do not seem to involve the word "love" at all. She would rather fill her son Bertie's day with the kind of activities that might contribute to his intellectual development, but overlook the fact that he is a six-year-old trying to make sense of the world around him. Domenica's obsession with the fate of the tea cup has a strong echo of E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia, where even the most banal occurrence gets blown up into a major incident. Like Irene, her preoccupations render her insensible to what's happening around her - especially the feelings of her close friend Angus towards her.

In the end the story ends happily, but not without a good deal of heart-searching on the part of the two female protagonists, while McCall Smith himself takes a few side-swipes at the so-called "nanny state" the representatives of which believe that they have all the answers about how to be a good parent, even if that means separating mother from son.

Nothing really significant happens in The Blue Spode Tea Cup; but that is precisely the point, as the production makes us aware of the significance people attach to even the most mundane occurrences.