Just thought I'd chime in here, the BBC's online radio service was indeed working for me on Wednesday morning at 4.45am and I live in Tasmania, Australia. The trick I found was to get a mate in the UK to jump in and grab me a direct url to the stream pointer (for some reason he was only able to get the .ram) and then plug that into VLC.
Granted it did go garbly every 5 minutes or so but all that is required to fix it was clicking stop then play. So it IS possible.