Indian actress Shilpa Shetty -- one of the most recognised faces in Britain -- and many leading British Asian personalities have led over 100 prominent people in a campaign to save the BBC Asian Network, whose closure was announced earlier this week.
In a letter to the BBC Trust chairman, Sir Michael Lyons,Shetty, actor-writer Meera Syal and Olympic boxer Amir Khan have called for the radio station to be saved. Signatories include cricketer Vikram Solanki, film director Gurinder
Chada, and Sir Mota Singh.
The letter published Saturday in The Guardian, expresses the signatories' "profound shock" at the BBC's decision to shut the national station.
It says that the eight-year-old digital broadcasterprovides a "key platform" for the national Asian community "and offers creative British Asian talent an outlet which is
demonstrably under-represented in the more mainstream BBC.
This would all be tragically lost if these proposals are agreed."
The decision to shut both the Asian Network and 6 Music were part of a strategy review announced by the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson. It said the Asian station's output was
expensive in terms of cost per listener and its output was said to be "inconsistent".
The station, which broadcasts mainly in English but also has programmes in Hindi/Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujurati and Mirpuri, has also lost around 20 per cent of its listeners over the last three years, totalling an average of 360,000
listeners a week at the end of last year.