I was concerned to learn that mum had Sky News on the TV all day. News of the most depressing sort, on a half-hour loop, can't be good for anyone. I asked the carers who visit to tune the TV to UK Gold. Not to everybody's taste, I admit - but mum likes it, and to quote Douglas Adams, it's "Mostly harmless".
I don't want her to lose the news altogether though, and I can't rely on the carers to switch between channels. So I have a couple of scripts that grab a podcast from the BBC website every Monday - Friday, and play it at 7 o'clock.
The bashpodder.shell script gets the podcast. It's not one of mine; the original is available from http://lincgeek.org/bashpodder. I just tweaked it a bit, and edited the config file, so that it just points at the BBC podcast (http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio/newspod/rss.xml).
The news.pl Perl script plays the podcast. Well, it also plays the chimes of Big Ben before the news starts. You can download the chimes from http://www.parliament.uk, and then use Audacity or similar to get the number you want.
A couple of crontab entries launch the scripts:
23 18 * * 1-5 /home/guiplug/pods/bashpodder.shell
59 18 * * 1-5 /usr/local/bin/news.pl
Mum tells me she likes it.