The Chip Shop has got the chop. BBC Radio's most popular contribution to home computing has gone off the air, perhaps for good.

A BBC spokesman said last week: "It's not coming back in the immediate future, but that doesn't mean to say it's gone away for ever."

But the return of the Chip Shop, which opened on Radio Four and later found a slot on Radio One as well, may depend on the BBC being granted permission to raise the licence fee to £65. This is far from settled, and if the fee is increated the Chip Shop will have to take its place in a queue of projects that are starved of funds.

"It was rather expensive to produce," said the spokesman. "The Chip Shop was going to be produced in Manchester, but that proved to be too expensive," he added irrelevantly.

The removal of the Chip Shop leaves the BBC's radio coverage of micros slanted strongly towards the highly technical subjects of its educational broadcasting. The writing has been on the wall since the turn of the year, when the Corporation's pleas for a higher licence started to win wide publicity.

Four weeks ago we reported that the Basicode programs transmitted by the Chip Shop were about to be cut - now the whole programme has gone the same way.

Local radio stations, meanwhile, are going from strength to strength. In particular, the programmes developed by Radio West in Bristol are now widely syndicated and broadcast over much of the country, with the greatest concentration in southern England.

But where the BBC tried to make the compromise of Basicode work, the local stations have broadcast machine-specific software.

Basicode is an attempt at a transportable Basic; in the form of telesoftware it could be downloaded on to any one of nineteen micros, but in order to be transportable it had to be limited in scope.

The BBC found it expensive to produce for a return that was difficult to measure - the devisers of Basicode intended it as a non-profit-making system.

BBC Television, by contrast, is expanding. Micro Live is due to go weekly and two new series are planned.