Ok, on further investigation it appeared that an over zealous “cut and paste” from the BBC website (the URL oddly enough) brought with it some insane div tags which weren’t properly nested. This in turn, adjusted the natural flow of the page and made the “sidebar” content become part of the main page content.

In IE this had the effect of moving the sidebar to the bottom of the page, FireFox had the decency to do this as well as removing the background image. Nice.

Still, solved now.