Kirk Northrop wrote

regional characters. So, how many people get gibberish when I say the
price of a One Day Bus Pass currently stands at £3.50?

You'd think that most reasonably modern newsreaders would be able to
use
UTF-8, wouldn't you...

UTF-8 is fairly rare, or rather characters other than basic ascii and
utf-8 are uncommon and may be mistaken for some other fault.

On a private news-server (Baen's Bar) with many utf-8 posts one US user
of Agent found his setup gave ? for curly quotes because he wasn't
using a Unicode font.

I don't recognise Alpine, but many reasonably modern newsreaders don't
handle Html well either.

--
Mike D