For a new Radio 4 sitcom

Irish sketch group Diet of Worms are returning to the BBC with a Radio 4 pilot.

KÜLT is a live audience sitcom that features the quintet as dysfunctional stockroom workers in a massive global furniture corporation based in Dublin for tax purposes – a modern Nordic company which resembles an insane religious sect more than a traditional business.

Adam Buxton guest stars in the 30-minute pilot, which will air later this year, as Petr Stilling Jr, the charismatic chief executive of the company. A hands-on leader, he's extremely charming and affable on the surface but has a megalomaniacal core.

Produced by former stand-up Arnab Chanda in-house for the BBC, KÜLT is the first time that the Dublin-based group of Shane Langan, Phillipa Dunne, Rory Connolly, Niall Gaffney and Amy Stephenson have worked with the Corporation since it dropped their sitcom The Walshes after three episodes in 2014.

Co-creator Graham Linehan blamed the BBC for not sufficiently publicising the show, but Langan dismisses any suggestion of lingering bad feeling.

'We've been working on KÜLT since before The Walshes aired on BBC Two, so even when the series didn't get picked up, we still had this other BBC project to keep working on,' he told Chortle. 

'It was a dream come true getting The Walshes on the BBC and the same is true of getting this far with KÜLT on Radio 4. We've been really lucky.'

Ireland's attractive tax breaks, controversially exploited by multinational organisations like Apple, Facebook and Google, were an obvious source for satire.

And Langan suggests that 'it is sort of funny that so many of the world's biggest companies have found themselves basing their European operations in little old Dublin. 

'But, to be honest it's not something we dwell too much on. It's just handy for us. This way we can just use our own Irish accents. No one wants to hear us doing British accents, really.'

KÜLT is a 'distant cousin' of the group's 2011 play, Cult, about five members of a doomsday cult left behind 'down below' following an ascension.

Langan says: 'We liked the idea of consumerism as a religion, so we melded our cult with a Scandinavian flat-pack furniture multinational. 

'We also gradually developed and tweaked the individual characters. So yes, it is based on our play, but after developing it with our producer Arnab Chanda for around 18 months, it's now practically unrecognisable from the original.'

Tickets for KÜLT, which is recording at London's BBC Radio Theatre on March 30, are available http://www.bbc.co.uk/showsandtours/shows/kult_30mar16">here.

• Radio 4 is  to adapt Michael Fabbri's stand-up show about dyslexia, Chortle can reveal.

Sufferers such as Eddie Izzard, Ross Noble and Jim Jefferies have previously related the condition to their ability to combine disparate phenomenon for comic effect.

But Michael Fabbri's Dyslexicon is 'not a message of hope and encouragement'. The two, 30-minute episodes, airing from May 27, recall a catalogue of mistakes and challenges, including the mental scarring of Fabbri's school years when he was forced to play Romeo and was confronted with surprise bible readings.

Made by Dabster Productions, which also made Jo Caulfield's Speakeasy for Radio 4, the show is produced by Sean Kerwin and Alan Lorraine and executive produced by Richard Melvin.

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 10 Mar 2016