TELEVISION coverage of the FA Cup Final and Wimbledon tennis could be disrupted by industrial action after BBC employees voted overwhelmingly yesterday to go on strike.

The protest, against plans to cut 3,800 jobs announced this year by Mark Thompson, the Director-General, is also likely to affect the evening news on BBC1, as well as current affairs programmes such as Newsnight. Representatives from the three BBC unions — Bectu, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and Amicus, the engineering union — will meet today to agree a programme of strikes, most probably a series of one or two-day stoppages. Sport and news are most at risk of being halted, because they are produced live, while the bulk of the rest of the BBC’s output is pre-recorded.

Luke Crawley, the senior BBC official at Bectu, the broadcast union, said: “We’ll be looking to take action on days that will do the most damage to the BBC, and see if we can achieve blank screens and dead air.”

Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the NUJ, said that “the Cup Final is potentially a target” and added: “Now it is the time for BBC staff to stop lecturing staff and start listening to their concerns.”

The unions want Mr Thompson to agree that he will make no compulsorily redundancies while ensuring that employees who are transferred to the private sector will receive BBC terms and conditions.

Last night there was little sign of compromise. BBC bosses argue that the job cuts are necessary to free £355 million a year in licence-payers’ money to invest in programming from 2008. Mr Thompson believes that the BBC has a history of inefficiency and that without cost reductions it will struggle to justify the continuing receipt of public money — which currently amounts to £2.7 billion a year. A BBC spokesman said: “Given the scale of the changes that the BBC needs to make, and that the unions have not allowed us to talk to them in order to address their concerns, we are not surprised by the ballot result, but we are disappointed, because we would prefer to continue constructive discussions.”

Union representatives have complained that meetings with the BBC have been pointless so far. “We’ve had a lovely Power Point presentation, but no opportunity to negotiate,” Mr Dear said.

The BBC is likely to try to recruit non-union labour to ensure that it does transmit the Cup Final, but it is possible that the FA could re-assign the “host broadcast” rights elsewhere, as the event is transmitted around the world. BSkyB, in which News Corporation, parent company of The Times, has a 35.3 per cent stake, also broadcasts the match and could provide a feed, although that could mean that familiar commentators are absent for BBC viewers.

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