Steve Penk slams BBC's Evans promotion

Steve Penk, owner of North West radio station Revolution 96.2, has written to the BBC Trust complaining about "unfair cross-promotion" of Chris Evans's new Radio 2 breakfast show.

Penk, who presents his own breakfast programme on the Oldham-based radio station, said that he was "quite appalled" by the quantity of BBC television promos for the show, in which Evans took over from Sir Terry Wogan.

According to reports, the DJ pointed to plugs for the programme on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, The One Show and The Andrew Marr Show, and joked that he was "half expecting" to see Evans on Songs Of Praise.

"Chris Evans is a former colleague and an old friend of mine and I wish him well, but as a licence payer and radio privateer I am quite appalled at the sheer scale of this unfair cross-promotion," he said.

"The lavishly-produced promotional trailer must have cost a king's ransom to make and it ran to some 60 seconds. It was on all over the weekend."

Penk said that the BBC's "unashamed promotion" of The Chris Evans Breakfast Show "flies in the face" of its own cross-promotional codes.

He further claimed that the corporation failed to honour its obligations under the Royal Charter to fully monitor the competitive impact of its activities.

"In these hard times it is difficult enough for the large, quasi-national commercial radio brands to compete with such unfair 'free' publicity," he added.

"As the sole owner of a small commercial radio business which has been hit hard by the economic downturn I was sickened to the stomach by this wilful misuse of licence money and clear breach of BBC Trust codes."

Neither the BBC Executive or BBC Trust have so far responded to the criticism.