[harshy]

I'm not sure this is particularly true. They have always had some UK news programmes on weekends and had a lot of UK originated pre-records during the early days, but for a long time were always particularly keen to avoid being parochial in general news programming, though of course this depended to a degree on time slots. Where UK news did appear on an average day, it was generally in terms of 'and finally' pieces, business (owing to London's status as a global financial centre) and sport (particularly things like the Premier League). For a long time, a hard news UK story had to be genuinely internationally relevant to get on the running order. UK politics has only creeped in more since 2015 - particularly in Euro Evening and US early evening programmes like Outside Source and 100 Days.

Actually, ginnyfan is correct. I had a satellite dish installed in 2002 and was a regular viewer of BBC World back then. They would pretty regularly cover British politics and economics and not just internationally relevant stories. I seem to recall Gary O'Donoghue was BBC World's dedicated UK political correspondent around that time and would quite regularly feature on the channel. I remember them covering the Hutton Inquiry quite heavily. BBC World was quite a strange beast that definitely catered, at least to some degree, to British expats as well as foreign viewers. It was only later on that British news seemed to be relegated in favour of news stories from other countries.

I think I installed mine as early as 2000 bbc world did cover Uk political stuff but well down the pecking order and it was always unusual to see the British prime minister captioned as well which was Tony Blair at the time, it was strange it felt very arms length back then and were allowed to do it’s own thing and had better presentation then news 24 at the time.