Cultural Exception: Exceptionally Paranoid

Radio gaga:

English-language radio stations complained Tuesday they had been refused an FM licence in Paris, a city which currently has Armenian, Portuguese and Arabic broadcasters but not a single English language station.
The BBC World Service, Paris Live Radio and World Radio Paris were all excluded from a shortlist of contenders for licences drawn up by the CSA, the French broadcasting authority.
"It is unknown in the developed world for a major city to not have at least some local radio in English," said Ian de Renzie Duncan, the director of Paris Live Radio, which has broadcast on satellite and cable in France.
"The CSA have just said 'no English radio' on our turf," he said in a statement.

Remember – this is about a frequency auction. It only puts them 9 years behind the US in getting out of the business of micromanaging the airwaves, and they still wrap their brains around the notion of private ownership, let alone foreign-seeming ownership of a frequency. So for the time being, the listener remains stuck with a weak AM signal for the BBC World Service, and nighttime listening on LW and AM from the UK reminiscent of the last century which is only enjoyable if you’re a old-fashioned DXer.

N.B. - Otherwise your choices are cable (pfft!) or satellite if your “quaint” shoebox apartment can see the south-western sky – something which this correspondent happens to experimenting with to making homesickness for North Americans a thing of the past. (Further details will be presented if things start looking promising.)