Backing Britain in the search for fresh talent.

It is not quite akin to Gordon Brown's rallying cry of "British jobs for British people", but Radio Two head of music Jeff Smith has fully thrown his weight behind giving preferential treatment to homegrown artists on the network.

Although not going anywhere near as far as introducing some kind of quota for British music as some in the music industry desire, Smith is nevertheless going further than other BBC colleagues in terms of the support he is prepared to give on the Radio Two playlist for domestic artists.

"Where there is competition, UK artists will be preferred and what I've said to the record industry when we went round is that basically, in a like-for-like basis, if there is one slot left on the B-list or something like that and there's a British and American artist and it's pretty much the same quality, then we'll go with the UK artist," he says.

His declaration follows a public spat a few years back when some label bosses criticised Radio One in particular for what it saw as a lack of support for homegrown artists on the daytime playlist, at a time when American artists were heavily dominating the charts.

"Being the British ...