Banshee now supports user-defined stations correctly and so you can add the BBC feeds without the fear that they may get nuked by refreshing from the Banshee server. You can either add them manually one-by-one or download a full BBC radio playlist. One amendment to make this work with the new version: Save the bbc.xspf file to ~/.gnome2/banshee/plugins/stations/user and you should be good to go.

Many thanks again to Roger Light for helping me trace the source of my problem with li on Planet SUSE. Turned out it was a classic PEBCAK scenario and I feel really dumb now. Serves as a reminder that I need to do a serious tidy up on PS at some point. Thankfully it works as intended now.