Follow the mail on Twitter.

• +
• -
• Text size

I was terribly sad to read that hundreds of jobs are at risk at the BBC World Service as a result of the funding cuts imposed in the latest licence fee settlement with the government.

The corporation has now taken on responsibility for funding the station, which costs around £272 million a year and is currently paid for by the Foreign Office. So licence payers are in effect, now coughing up for a service they cannot receive on their radio and is certainly not targeted at them.

So, what can the BBC do to please licence payers in the UK, licence paying expatriates abroad and save money?

The bitter reality, as many British expatriates will tell you, is that the World Service has axed almost every programme which appealed to them over the past decade including popular music, entertainment shows and the ‘News from Britain’ segment.

A sure way to make significant savings, would to be to take a leaf from other smaller external broadcasters and relay a few popular domestic shows on their English language service – for example: The World Tonight, Today and PM – would all sit well on the World Service (and fill the schedule with 6.5 hours of extra, free broadcasting).

I’m not proposing that fine World Service programmes such as The World Today, World Briefing and World Have Your say should be shelved – but blended in with the domestic mix.

With such a large hole now in their budget, serious decisions have to be made and utilizing the best of their own domestic programming may fill some of the gap – and keep the high standards we have come to expect from the BBC.

And, without sounding selfish, the FM signal of BFBS relays of Today on 89.7 FM in Nicosia is dodgy at best - so plonk it on the Cyprus World Service relay at 1323 AM and traffic jams will be much easier to handle.