Hi @WobblyBob
Welcome to the Sonos Community!
I've marked this thread as a feature request and it will be seen by the relevant teams for consideration.
In the meanwhile, the following kludge might work for you, if you were willing to have only one “Sonos Favorite”, the BBC service:
I have defined one single radio station in my Favorites list. (It happens to be via TuneIn, which I know BBC shuns nowadays but see below…) Then I installed a Lutron “Caseta” Wireless Smart Bridge in the closet and their Pico Remote for Audio on the dining table. Now I press the circular button in the middle of the Pico which “cycles among the Favorites” but in this case is just the radio station! Thus no cell phone needed. Not as simple as pressing the play button on the speaker, but it’s still pretty minimal, both physically and mentally.
The Favorites don’t need to be TuneIn radio stations; I tried a playlist too, and I believe any service, i.e. your Beeb, can be a Sonos Favorite? (Not an expert at using services so YMMV.) If you really use the system to its fullest and have a whole screenful of Favorites defined, then this isn’t for you, but if you use few enough services that you can get anything with just a couple clicks and thus favorites have no value to you, then give it a shot. (Another Sonos remote with that Favorites function, i.e. a Nuimo Click’s Star-button, worked the same.)
Another alternative would be to use a Voice Assistant either on a compatible Sonos speaker or a third-party device like the Echo Dot, which can be told to always play to a Sonos speaker with an implicit command (“Play Radio X” as opposed to “Play Radio X in the Kitchen”).
Thanks for the tips. To be honest I’m not looking to introduce additional devices, my use case is Sonos or Apple/siri. Fingers crossed the feature may become a reality in the not too distant future