HIT by a barrage of flak from listeners over Radio Lancashire's failure to observe the two-minute silence on Armistice Day, BBC bosses are running for cover.

Don't blame the station staff for the omission. They wanted to broadcast the 11 o'clock silence.

But, they claim, bosses on high said they could not.

Now, feeling the heat of public outrage, the high-ups say the local station could have put out the silence after all.

Yet, in effect, it would have had to have been someone else's silence - coming from an outside broadcast of an Armistice Day event - rather than the station's own.

What mealy-mouthed cant.

For the staff claim that they suggested just such a compromise but the station was forbidden under any circumstances from relaying anyone else's silence.

But, whatever the truth of this claim and counter claim, the fact is that Radio Lancashire was barred at senior level from broadcasting its own respectful silence.

So who was the insensitive, disrespectful misery-guts responsible for that edict?

Let's have none of the evasive guff about this being a "corporate decision" with no one person being responsible.

Stand up the faceless author of this misadventure and have the courage to either apologise for it or to defend it.

These weasel words will not do.

One BBC apparatchik even had the audacity to question why the Lancashire Evening Telegraph was publicising the row. "I don't suppose you observed the silence," he said.

Well, as a matter of fact, we did - and so should Radio Lancashire and all the other local radio stations across the country who wanted to pay respect to our war dead.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.