a) the BBC goes to great lengths to stop people downloading
Yes, but apparently there are scripts available (Perl and Ruby are the two I saw) to get around this problem.
b) doesn't play on the N8x0, not enough grunt!
Ok, well that's a limiting factor then. Just need to improve the grunt!
I think the best hope here is to use the Flash (Spark) stream, or the RTSP (N96) stream, both of which I know the N8x0 can already handle, it just needs a pleasant GUI.
Yes, some sort of wrapper like the youtube scraper would be good.